From bebop to hip-hop, Quincy Jones exemplified the 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.
By the time of his death on Nov. 3 at 91 at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, he had become a renaissance impresario of music, film and television, catapulting the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith and smashing barriers for other African Americans. Mr. Jones’s death, of undisclosed causes, was announced by his publicist, Arnold Robinson, and in a family statement.
Mr. Jones’s six-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.”
Starting out as a jazz trumpeter, Mr. Jones was in Seattle in 1947 playing juke joints with 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), a major flop. In 1977 he shared an Emmy Award for his score of the TV miniseries “Roots,” a ratings juggernaut that traced a slave’s lineage.
In 1979, he 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.
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 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 James Ingram (whose “The Dude” sold more than 1 million copies), Sammy Davis Jr., Barbra Streisand, Helen Merrill, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Andy Williams and Sonny Bono. “He’s Doctor Fixit,” trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie once 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 a staggering 27 Grammys (out of a record 79 nominations) and seven Oscar nominations. He 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.’”
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 said 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 bandleader Duke Ellington died in 1974, he gave Mr. Jones a photograph with the inscription:
“To Q, who will de-categorize American music.”
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.
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.
He 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, and a son.
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.”
