Quincy Jones, Master of All Things Musical, Dies at 91
Quincy Jones, the musical giant who did it all as a record producer, film composer, multi-genre artist, entertainment executive and humanitarian, has died. He was 91.
Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, said that he died Sunday night at his Bel-Air home surrounded by his family.
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“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” his family said in a statement. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”
Jones received the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, the Grammy Legend Award in 1991 and 28 Grammys from an all-time best 80 nominations. He was to be presented with an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards on Nov. 17.
Survivors include one of his seven children, actress Rashida Jones.
In a phenomenal career that spanned more than 60 years, Jones produced Michael Jackson’s best-selling albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad; obtained the rights to the novel The Color Purple, cast a young Oprah Winfrey in the Steven Spielberg 1985 film adaptation and received three Oscar nominations for his work; helmed the historic recording sessions for the 1985 charity single “We Are the World,” the best-selling single of all time; and produced Lesley Gore’s 1963 chart-topping hit “It’s My Party.”
The first U.S. feature that Jones scored was Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), and he did the music for two landmark films released in 1967: the best picture Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night and Truman Copote’s In Cold Blood.
He described his first visit to Hollywood to THR‘s Seth Abramovitch in May 2021.
“I was dressed in my favorite suit, and the producer came out to meet me at Universal,” he said. “He stopped in his tracks — total shock — and he went back and told [music supervisor] Joe Gershenson, ‘You didn’t tell me Quincy Jones was a Negro.’ They didn’t use Black composers in films. They only used three-syllable Eastern European names, Bronislaw Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin. It was very, very racist.”
For television, Jones composed the theme songs for such series as the 1969-71 Bill Cosby Show, Ironside and Sanford and Son and executive produced such series as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he discovered Will Smith, and In the House, starring LL Cool J.
He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, and the next year he produced the documentary Keep on Keepin’ On, about jazz legend Clark Terry and his mentorship of a blind piano prodigy.
Jones survived two brain aneurysms in 1974. After the first, he wrote in his 2008 book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions: Photos, Letters, Memories & More From Q’s Personal Collection, “It didn’t look like I’d make it, so my friends planned a memorial … They had the concert anyway.”
With his neurologist at his side, he attended the service at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles as Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, Sarah Vaughan and Sidney Poitier spoke of his greatness.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933, to parents Quincy Delight Jones Sr. and Sarah Frances Jones. His mother worked in a bank before being admitted to a mental institution for schizophrenia when Quincy was 7; his father was a carpenter who played semi-pro baseball. He was raised with his only full-blood brother, Lloyd.
Quincy Sr. divorced Sarah shortly after she was institutionalized and remarried a woman named Elvera, who had three children. They then had three more of their own for an eight-sibling family.
“We were in the heart of the largest Black ghetto in Chicago during the Depression,” Jones recalled in an interview for the Academy of Achievement, “and every block was the spawning ground for every gangster, Black and white, in America too. So, we were around all of that.”
His father in 1943 uprooted the family to Bremerton, Washington, where he accepted a new job. They later moved to Seattle, where Quincy Jr. attended Garfield High School and ignited his passion for the arts by studying music composition and learning to play the trumpet. That kept him out of trouble.
When just a teenager, Jones met a 16-year-old Ray Charles — a meeting captured in the 2004 Jamie Foxx film Ray — who became a huge inspiration, teacher and friend, and they would work together on several musical projects.
Jones attended Seattle University, studied music and played in the college band — Clint Eastwood also was a student at the time — but completed just one semester before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship. He left college to tour with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger for some of the era’s leading talents, including Charles, Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa. His first Grammy win was for the song arrangement on Count Basie’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
Jones signed as an artist with ABC Paramount Records in 1956 and moved a year later to Paris, where he studied with music theorist Nadia Boulanger and became the musical director for the Les Disques Barclay label. He toured throughout Europe, working as musical director on composer Harold Arlen’s Free and Easy tour, and he formed a band called The Jones Boys that was comprised of jazz artists from that show. They got great reviews, but money was scarce.
“We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving,” he told Musician magazine. “That’s when I discovered that there was music and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”
Jones began working with Frank Sinatra in 1958 when they collaborated on a benefit show for which Jones did the arrangements. Sinatra hired him to arrange his 1964 album It Might as Well Be Swing with the Count Basie Orchestra, and Jones worked on the 1966 live set Sinatra at the Sands, which contained his famous arrangement of “Fly Me to the Moon” (that was the first recording played by astronaut Buzz Aldrin when he landed on the lunar surface in 1969).
He collaborated with Sinatra through various TV shows and other recordings during the years, and that led to arranging gigs for other artists like Billy Eckstine and Peggy Lee.
“There was no gray to the man. It was either Black or white,” Jones said of Sinatra in 2001’s Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. “If he loved you, there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for you. If he didn’t like you, shame on your ass. I know he loved me too. In all the years working together, we never once had a contract — just a handshake.”
Jones’ solo albums gained him acclaim, including Walking in Space, Gula Matari, Smackwater Jack, You’ve Got It Bad, Girl, Body Heat, Mellow Madness and I Heard That!
“Soul Bossa Nova,” a 1962 song he wrote and produced, was used for the 1998 World Cup in France and was featured in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969) and in the Austin Powers movies.
Irving Green, president and founder of Mercury Records, helped Jones secure a music director position at the label. He advanced to vice president in 1961, becoming the first African-American to achieve that high a post at a major label.
During his time as an executive, he moonlighted as a film composer, scoring the critically acclaimed Pawnbroker for Lumet, which led to his exit from Mercury for Los Angeles and even more work in this area.
In 1965, he composed the score for Sydney Pollack’s first film, The Slender Thread, starring Poitier. Jones would work on other movies including Walk, Don’t Run (1966), Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing (1967), Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), The Italian Job (1969), Cactus Flower (1969), They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and The Getaway (1972).
In 1968, Jones became the first African-American to receive two Oscar noms in the same year. He and songwriting partner Bob Russell (they were the first African-Americans to be nominated for best original song) were honored for “The Eyes of Love” from the Robert Wagner romantic drama Banning, and his original score for In Cold Blood was nominated as well. (For the latter film, Jones listened to the interrogation tapes of the punks who committed the murders for inspiration.)
In 1971, Jones became the first African-American to be named as the musical director and conductor of the Oscars, and he served as executive producer for the Academy Awards in 1996. His Hersholt award marked another first for an African-American.
With seven Oscar noms, he is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the African-American with the most.
In 1975, Jones founded Qwest Productions, for which he arranged and produced certified albums by Sinatra and other major pop stars. He produced the soundtrack for The Wiz (1978), starring Jackson and Diana Ross.
Jones’ 1981 album, The Dude, yielded multiple hit singles, including “Ai No Corrida” (a remake of a song by Chaz Jankel), “Just Once” and “One Hundred Ways,” the latter two featuring James Ingram on lead vocals and marking Ingram’s first hits.
He formed the label Qwest Records in 1980 as a joint venture with Warner Music Group, building a roster that included an eclectic group of musicians, among them British post-punk band New Order, Joy Division, Ingram, Sinatra, Tevin Campbell, Andre Crouch, Patti Austin, Siedah Garrett, Gregory Jefferson and Justin Warfield.
For The Color Purple, Jones was nominated for best picture, original score and original song — three of the drama’s 11 Academy Award noms — but he and the film went home empty-handed on Oscar night. (He also was a producer on the 2023 remake.)
Jones’ social activism was an important part of his life. He supported Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and later Jesse Jackson’s P.U.S.H. movement and worked alongside Bono on a number of humanitarian projects, one in particular to eliminate Third World debt. He founded an organization called The Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, which builds homes in Africa and connects youth with learning music and culture.
He famously used his influences to attract the musical superstars of the day into the A&M Studios in L.A. in 1985, leading the session for “We Are the World” by demanding the participating artists “check your ego at the door.” The song raised more than $63 million for Ethiopian famine relief.
He formed Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990 in a co-venture with Time Warner. QJE produced the NBC sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which put Smith on the map as an actor and artist, as well as UPN’s In the House and Fox’s Mad TV, among others.
In 1993, he co-founded QDE, Quincy Jones/David Salzman Entertainment, producing films, TV shows and educational entertainment and publishing two magazines, VIBE and Spin.
Jones, who said he spoke 26 languages and could write in seven, was married to high-school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell from 1957-66, to actress Ulla Andersson from 1967-74 and to actress Peggy Lipton of TV’s The Mod Squad (Rashida’s mom) from 1974-90. His seven children included one with dancer Carol Reynolds and another with actress Nastassja Kinski.
His family asks that donations in his memory be made to the Jazz Foundation of America.
“When life begins to seem like too much, we should take a moment to let the soul catch up with the body,” he wrote in The Complete Quincy Jones. “Go out and find a song you love, a poem that touches your heart, and take the time to let the whisper of heaven’s voice come into your mind. Every day that you wake up and are still above the ground — that should be the only reason you need to be happy.”
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