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Quincy Jones, musical innovator and impresario, dies at 91

Story by the Washington Post

Written by Tim Breiving

Other Link: Kirk Tanter Blog: Quincy Jones, Grammy-Winning Producer for Michael Jackson, Film Composer, Dies at 91

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From bebop to hip-hop, Quincy Jones exemplified the musical producer and arranger as star. He elevated the voices of dozens of entertainers — most indelibly Michael Jackson, but also Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin — with his unsurpassed artistry in combining jazz, rhythm-and-blues and classical orchestration.

Mr. Jones’s seven-decade career was nothing short of Zelig-like. He brimmed with anecdotes about his encounters with figures from Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to Sinatra to the rap star Tupac Shakur, who was engaged to one of Mr. Jones’s daughters before his murder in 1996.

“It takes a lot of guts to tell Sinatra what to do, man,” Mr. Jones once told the Sunday Telegraph of London. “He takes no prisoners and if you ask him to jump without a net, you better have got it right. … He would love you, or roll over you with a truck and then reverse.”

Sunday at the age of 91, his publicist said.
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Starting out as a jazz trumpeter, Mr. Jones was in Seattle in 1947 playing juke joints with the teenaged Ray Charles. A decade later, he was in Paris studying composition with Nadia Boulanger, mentor to Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. As the first African American to be a senior executive at a major White-owned music label — Mercury Records — he produced Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party.” The next year, he arranged the jazz-pop mainstay “Fly Me to the Moon” for Sinatra and Count Basie; it was Sinatra who bestowed on him his enduring nickname, “Q.”

Mr. Jones helped score films as diverse as “In Cold Blood” (1967), an acclaimed drama based on Truman Capote’s account of the notorious Clutter family murders in Kansas, and the all-Black musical “The Wiz” (1978). In 1977 he shared an Emmy Award for his score of the TV miniseries “Roots,” a ratings juggernaut that traced an enslaved man’s lineage.

In 1979, Mr. Jones ushered the child singing prodigy Jackson into adulthood by producing the album “Off the Wall.” Three years later, he followed up with “Thriller,” the top-selling pop release of all time. He produced the all-star charity song “We Are the World” in 1985, a best-selling single that raised $50 million for African famine relief.

He coproduced the film “The Color Purple” (1985), directed by Steven Spielberg, and handpicked Winfrey, then a rising Chicago-based talk show host, for her breakout dramatic role. In 1990, he produced the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” composing the theme song and casting the down-on-his-luck rapper Smith in the title role. Mr. Jones produced Bill Clinton’s inaugural celebration concert in 1993.

Quincy Jones, musical innovator and impresario, dies at 91© Sunny Bak/AP
Mr. Jones with Will Smith during Season 1 of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."© Nbc/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

Mr. Jones’s impact on American popular music was incalculable. He surrounded Jackson’s vocals in “Baby Be Mine” with a funky bass line inspired by John Coltrane’s saxophone and, on “Beat It,” gave the softish high tenor a rock edge with Eddie Van Halen’s electric guitar solo.

Mr. Jones poured fizzing piano and saxophones around Dinah Washington’s voice in “I Get a Kick Out of You.” His own carefree standard “Soul Bossa Nova,” memorably punctuated with the laughter-like sound of a Brazilian cuíca drum, was reclaimed in the late ’90s as a camp theme for “Austin Powers.”

He helped shape the recordings of singers as varied as Sammy Davis Jr., Barbra Streisand, Helen Merrill, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Andy Williams and Sonny Bono. “He’s Doctor Fixit,” trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie told People magazine. “He knows the sound you’ve got in you, and he’s got the experience and the know-how to get it out. If I knew how he does it, I’d be a millionaire.”

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Jones became the first African American to score major Hollywood films. He was the first African American to produce the Academy Awards, in 1996, with Whoopi Goldberg as host.

He founded a media empire that included his record label (Qwest Records), a film and TV production company (QDE Entertainment) and the Black music magazine Vibe. Mr. Jones received 28 Grammys (out of 80 nominations); only singer Beyoncé and conductor Georg Solti have won more Grammy, with 32 and 31, respectively). Mr. Jones received seven Oscar nominations, won the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995 and was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2001.

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Smithsonian magazine in 2008: “Quincy has a lifeline into the collective consciousness of the American public … It’s one thing to find a person who is a brilliant creator and composer. It’s another to find a person who is just as brilliant as an entrepreneur.”

Mr. Jones said he looked for “divine intervention” and “goose bumps” in the studio, and he embraced colorful metaphors to explain his arranging. “A lot of the language we use is food related,” Bruce Swedien, Mr. Jones’s longtime sound engineer, told The Washington Post in 1996. “Q will say things like ‘put a little more garlic salt on the vocal.’”

TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey kisses musician Quincy Jones after he received the Jean Hersholt Award at the 67th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, on March 27, 1995.© Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images

Mr. Jones’s “garlic salt” was often on the cutting edge of popular taste. He was an early adopter of the synthesizer, fusing electronics and funk into his jazz albums for A&M Records.

He produced “Back on the Block” (1989), which featured rising rap star Ice-T. On the track “Jazz Corner of the World,” Mr. Jones threw a multigenerational party where rappers Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane were the hype men for a succession of solos by jazz eminences Gillespie, James Moody, Miles Davis, George Benson and a scatting Ella Fitzgerald in her final recording.

Among other Grammys, “Back on the Block” won for album of the year and the inaugural award for best rap performance by a duo.

“Quincy knows how to pull it out of different people,” rapper Melle Mel was quoted saying in Mr. Jones’s memoir, “Q.” “It’s tribal. He understands everybody’s talking drum. He’s the only guy in the world who can do that, who can reach all the way back to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and connect them to the rappers.”

By Mr. Jones’s telling, Jackson first approached him for advice on a producer for his first solo album. Mr. Jones volunteered his services, to the initial wariness of record executives who considered him “too jazzy” to work with the pop star. But “Off the Wall” became a sensation, as did “Thriller.” Both were assembled in the studio over days without sleep and on the cusp of madness — Mr. Jones’s favorite way to work.

Their last collaboration, “Bad” (1987), took more than a year to make and remained in Mr. Jones’s estimation their most polished but least spontaneous work.

In 2017, eight years after Jackson’s death from an accidental drug overdose, Mr. Jones won a lawsuit filed against the entertainer’s estate and was awarded $9.4 million in damages for unpaid royalties for the use of songs he produced in the posthumous Jackson concert film “This Is It.”

As he grew older, Mr. Jones was widely regarded as a reigning musical eminence, a link between jazz and hip-hop, a master of commingling styles to forge new ones. Just before composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington died in 1974, he gave Mr. Jones a photograph with the inscription:

“To Q, who will de-categorize American music.”

Michael Jackson holds his eight Grammys next to Mr. Jones in 1984.© Doug Pizac/AP

Makings of a music mogul

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago’s South Side on March 14, 1933, and grew up in grinding poverty during the Depression. His grandmother trapped and cooked rats when food was scarce. At 7, he saw his mother, musically gifted but emotionally troubled, wrestled into a straitjacket and institutionalized, apparently for schizophrenia.

His father, a master carpenter, was on the payroll of a notorious Black street gang. “All I saw were dead bodies, Tommy guns and stogies, and piles of money in back rooms,” Mr. Jones told the Guardian. “I had my hand nailed to a fence with a switchblade when I was seven. When you’re a kid, you want to be what you see, and I wanted to be a gangster.”

His father mostly absent, Mr. Jones was raised by a stepmother who showed a distinct preference for her own children and often beat Mr. Jones. “When I was 12,” he later recalled, “I fought back and knocked the hell out of her. But you can’t sit and whine about that.”

Around that time, his father moved to Washington state for a wartime job at a Naval base. With friends, Mr. Jones broke into a local recreation center to steal food and soda.

“Eventually I broke into all the supervisors’ rooms and there was one where I saw a little piano in the room and I closed the door,” he later told rapper and record producer Dr. Dre on his Beats 1 radio show, “The Pharmacy.” “Something said to me, ‘Idiot, go back in that room!’ I went back in the room and touched the piano … and every drop of blood in my body said, ‘This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’ … And it saved my life.”

At his junior high school, he joined the choir and school band and was quickly recognized as a musical prodigy. Among other instruments, he learned drums, tuba, French horn and piano, but the trumpet became his forte. Before long, he gained a following in area clubs.

The bandleader Basie, who met Mr. Jones during a trip through town, taught him sophisticated arranging techniques. At 15, he was hired to play and arrange in Lionel Hampton’s outfit, but the bandleader’s wife yanked him off the bus as it was about to pull out of Seattle, ordering him to first finish school.

After attending Schillinger House in Boston (now the Berklee College of Music), he went on the road with Hampton and met bebop idols such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Like many musicians at the time, he indulged in heroin and marijuana and pills. “It enhances the senses,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. “But as Bird himself said, ‘If you can’t play it’s not going to help you,’” he said, using a nickname for Parker.

Quincy Jones rehearses with the Lille orchestra during the Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland on July 11, 1993.© Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images
Mr. Jones and his daughter Rashida Jones in Los Angeles in 2017.© Vivien Killilea/Getty Images

After a long tour of Europe with the band, Mr. Jones stayed behind to work as a freelance arranger and conductor. He worked with the brilliant but ill-fated trumpeter Clifford Brown on landmark records, and with marquee singers such as Washington and Johnny Mathis.

He toured Europe with Gillespie’s band, then settled in Paris, immersing himself in a cultural milieu that included Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Françoise Sagan and Pablo Picasso and “a lot of wild people.” His workaholic tendencies and his carousing doomed his first marriage, to childhood sweetheart Jeri Caldwell, with whom he had a daughter.

Mr. Jones enjoyed a flurry of critical attention for his early 1960s big band, which played dates at the Monterey Jazz Festival and New York’s Birdland nightclub. But he had fallen into debt and was desirous of being “where the real money was” — behind the scenes as a label executive and producer.

After stepping down as a Mercury vice president in 1965, Mr. Jones moved to Los Angeles with the intent of breaking into film composing. He scored a Swedish film in 1961 and Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker” (1964), a drama starring Rod Steiger as a guilt-racked Holocaust survivor running a pawn shop in Harlem. That film led to an offer to score “Mirage” (1965), a major studio release starring Gregory Peck as an amnesiac investigating a murder he is accused of committing.

Mr. Jones later poured out scores for films including “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), sung by Charles, and “For Love of Ivy” (1968), and for TV series such as “Ironside” and several sitcoms and variety shows starring Bill Cosby.

Mr. Jones won a Grammy for best jazz instrumental on his 1969 album “Walking in Space,” which gathered a dream team of session players — flutist Hubert Laws, harmonica wiz Toots Thielemans, drummer Grady Tate — for Mr. Jones’s jazz-funk arrangements of songs from the musical “Hair” and numbers including Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe.”

His marriages to Caldwell, Swedish model and actress Ulla Andersson and “Mod Squad” actress Peggy Lipton ended in divorce. He had a relationship with actress Nastassja Kinski, who was 28 years his junior and with whom he had a daughter. Survivors include six other daughters, including actress Rashida Jones from his third marriage; a son; a brother; and two sisters.

In 1974, Mr. Jones narrowly survived two brain aneurysms, which forced him to retire the trumpet but not his voracious will to make music. As recounted a decade later in a Rolling Stone profile, his loved ones had gathered around his hospital bed after an operation, fearing the worst. A weakened Mr. Jones slowly lifted his hand and gave them the middle finger.

“If y’all think I’m cutting out,” he muttered, “forget it.”

Quincy Jones poses for photos after placing his hands in wet cement during a hand and footprint ceremony honoring Jones at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018, in Los Angeles.© Richard Shotwell/Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Quincy Jones, Grammy-Winning Producer for Michael Jackson, Film Composer, Dies at 91

Story by Variety

Written by Chris Morris

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18:  Music Producer and documentary subject Quincy Jones from "Keep On Keepin' On" poses for a portrait at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival Getty Images Studio on April 18, 2014 in New York City.  (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival

Quincy Jones, who distinguished himself over the course of a 70-year career in music as an artist, bandleader, composer, arranger and producer, has died. He was 91.

Jones died Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to a statement shared with Variety by his rep Arnold Robinson. A cause of death was not disclosed. 

“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing. 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,” the Jones family said in the statement. “He is truly one of a kind and we will miss him dearly; we take comfort and immense pride in knowing that the love and joy, that were the essence of his being, was shared with the world through all that he created. Through his music and his boundless love, Quincy Jones’ heart will beat for eternity."

Jones’ eminence in the entertainment community was so great that he went by a one-letter handle: “Q.”

Bred in the world of jazz, Jones became one of pop music’s most formidable figures. He collected six of his 28 Grammy Awards for his 1990 album “Back on the Block” and was a three-time producer of the year honoree.

To many, he is probably best known for his production collaborations with Michael Jackson, which began in 1979 with the singer’s breakthrough solo album “Off the Wall,” which has sold an estimated 20 million copies internationally.

Its chart-topping sequel “Thriller” (1982) — for which Jones took album of the year honors, plus a record of the year trophy for the track “Billie Jean” — remains the bestselling album of all time, with worldwide sales estimated in excess of 110 million. Jones went on to work with Jackson on his No. 1 1987 release “Bad.

In 1985, Jones made international headlines as the producer of USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” the single devoted to African famine relief; Jackson co-authored the song with Lionel Richie and led its all-star cast of vocalists.

Jones was the first African American to pen the score for a major motion picture, 1964’s “The Pawnbroker,” and went on to receive seven Oscar nominations for best original score and song. In 1995, he received AMPAS’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, another first for a Black artist.

He made his mark on TV as executive producer of the ’90s NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which brought rapper Will “Fresh Prince” Smith to prominence as an actor. In addition to the 2022 reboot of “Bel-Air,” he later exec produced the comedy skeins “In the House” and “MadTV”; the 10-hour 1995 documentary “The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll”; the 2014 documentary “Keep on Keepin’ On”; and the 2023 adaptation of “The Color Purple” directed by Blitz Bazawule.

Jones received a Tony Award nomination in 2006 as producer of the musical adaptation of “The Color Purple.”

In the publishing world, he founded the respected hip-hop magazine Vibe, which spawned a TV spinoff in 1997.

In recognition of the vast array of causes to which he contributed, Jones was named Variety’s philanthropist of the year in 2014.

He was born Quincy Delight Jones Jr. in Chicago. He took up the trumpet, his principal instrument, as a boy. At the age of 10, his family moved to Seattle; there, as a novice musician of 14, he met 17-year-old Ray Charles.

By 18, after studying at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Jones was touring with Lionel Hampton’s big band in a trumpet section that included Art Farmer and Clifford Brown. In the early ’50s, he honed his arranging chops by writing charts for trumpeter Clark Terry (an important early mentor), Count Basie, Dinah Washington and many others. He made his debut as a leader in 1953 in an octet co-led by drummer Roy Haynes.

After serving as band director for Dizzy Gillespie’s State Dept.-sponsored big band and doing stints at ABC-Paramount and France’s Barclay Records, Jones assembled an in-house orchestra at Mercury Records. Though a subsequent touring group collapsed financially, the association led to an A&R position at Mercury; by 1964, Jones was a VP at the label, where he produced pop singer Leslie Gore’s major hits.

In 1959-60, he arranged a pair of Charles’ finest albums, “The Genius of Ray Charles” and “Genius + Soul Jazz.” He received his first Grammy in 1964 for his arrangement of “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Charles’ hit version of Don Gibson’s country tune.

At the behest of Sidney Lumet, Jones wrote the score for the director’s 1964 drama “The Pawnbroker.” That assignment — the first for a Black musician — led to prestige composing jobs on such features as “In Cold Blood,” “In the Heat of the Night” (which featured a title song by Ray Charles), “The Italian Job,” “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice” and “The Getaway.”

In the mid-’60s, Jones established a working relationship with Frank Sinatra. He arranged a pair of albums teaming the vocalist with Count Basie’s orchestra, “It Might as Well Be Swing” (1964) and the live “Sinatra at the Sands” (1966).

In 1969, Jones began a profitable association as an artist with A&M Records, for which he recorded nine studio albums. He reaped three Grammys for his jazz-pop work at the label; in 1974, the A&M album “Body Heat” became the highest-charting set of his career, peaking at No. 8. In 1977, he released an album of his soundtrack music for the top-rated ABC miniseries “Roots” on the label; it reached No. 21 on the pop album chart.

While Jones busied himself over the years as a producer for such artists as Aretha Franklin, the Brothers Johnson, George Benson and Chaka Khan, it was his work with Michael Jackson that thrust him into the most rarefied stratum of the music industry.

In 1978, Jones was working as music supervisor on director Lumet’s film adaptation of the Broadway hit “The Wiz,” featuring Jackson as the Scarecrow. While the picture was in production, Jackson — then newly signed as a solo artist to Epic Records — sought Jones’ advice about potential producers for his upcoming album. After supplying the singer with a list of prospects, Jones was enlisted by Jackson for the job.

The phenomenal decade-long Jones-Jackson partnership resulted in three multiplatinum albums (including the unprecedented and still unequalled worldwide smash “Thriller”), 18 top-10 pop hits (including 10 No. 1 singles) and four Grammy Awards for Jones.

At the apex of Jackson’s popularity in January 1985, Jones recorded “We Are the World” with a cast of soloists that also included Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Diana Ross and Ray Charles. The benefit single sold an estimated 20 million copies worldwide and added an additional three Grammys, including one for record of the year, to Jones’ resume.

In 1980, Jones founded Qwest Records, a joint venture with Warner Bros. Records. The imprint released the Jones-penned soundtrack for Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” and signed such artists as George Benson, Tevin Campbell, New Order and, briefly, Sinatra (whose 1984 album “L.A. Is My Lady” was arranged by Jones). But its chief executive became its most prominent act.

Jones’ 1989 Qwest album “Back on the Block” — an all-star affair pairing Jones with legends like Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles and young bloods like Ice-T and Big Daddy Kane — captured a bounty of Grammys and peaked at No. 9 on the U.S. album chart.

In 1993, Warner Bros. released “Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux,” a 1991 live set by trumpeter Davis and Jones from the titular jazz festival in Switzerland on which Davis revisited compositions originally arranged in the ’50s by Gil Evans. It proved to be the jazz legend’s final recording and received a Grammy in 1994.

Jones’ latter-day solo releases were “Q’s Jook Joint” (1995) and “Q Soul Bossa Nostra” (2010). The former featured a host of seasoned R&B and jazz vets, young hip-hop stars and even a guest shot by Marlon Brando. The latter album, comprising new recordings of material associated with Jones, included appearances by such diverse artists as Jennifer Hudson, Amy Winehouse, Usher, Snoop Dogg, Wyclef Jean and Three 6 Mafia. In addition to appearing on The Weeknd’s 2022 album “Dawn FM” and in the music video for Travis Scott and Young Thug’s song “Out West,” Jones has only sporadically produced or performed as an artist. Upon the release of his self-titled 2018 documentary, Jones collaborated with producer Mark Ronson and vocalist Chaka Khan on the accompanying single “Keep Reachin’.” 

His Global Gumbo Orchestra made appearances at the Hollywood Bowl in 2011 and at that venue’s Playboy Jazz Festival in 2012. The group released “Tomorrow,” a charity single featuring stars of several Arab nations and co-produced by Jones and RedOne, in late 2011. After appearing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2017 to perform selections from his A&M years, Jones commemorated his 90th birthday in July 2023 with a two-night celebration at the venue featuring past and present artists he worked with, from singer Patti Austin to songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier.

Jones received the Recording Academy’s Legend Award in 1991 and Trustees Award in 1989. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001 and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2011. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 as the winner of the Ahmet Ertegun Award together with Lou Adler.

Jones released his autobiography “Q” in 2001; an audio version of the book received a Grammy as best spoken word album in 2002.

Married and divorced three times, he is survived by a brother, two sisters, six daughters including actor Rashida Jones, and a son.

Other Links:

Billboard: LL Cool J, Victoria Monét & More Remember Quincy Jones: ‘Music Would Not Be Music Without You'

Associated Press: Quincy Jones dies: Music titan produced Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' among others | AP News

Yahoo: Quincy Jones, Legendary Music Producer Who Worked with Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, Dies at 91