Quincy Jones, architect of 20th Century music, dead at the age 91

Quincy Jones, producer of several of the best-selling albums of all time, died at his home in Bel Air on Sunday as per his publicist. Though his work covered all genres, Jones will forever be best known for helping coronate the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, by helping craft Jackson’s infectious and highly lucrative sound across three classic albums: Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. In 1985, he produced the “We Are The World” session, arguably the apex of 1980s pop music. 

Jones, who in 1968 became the first African-American nominated for a Best Original Song Academy Award with “The Eyes of Love,” received an astonishing 80 Grammy nominations and 28 Grammy Awards throughout his career. His wins were for arranging, producing, and performing, and he won the 1988 Album of the Year prize for Back on the Block, an R&B-pop-hip hop cross-generational collaboration including artists like Ray Charles, Chaka Khan, Ice-T, Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane, and several others, recorded under his name. He holds the record for the third-highest number of Grammy wins in history, with classical conductor Sir Georg Solti at 31 and Beyoncé at 32 

Jones also won an Emmy in 1977 for composing the score to the legendary television miniseries Roots and a Tony in 2016 as producer for the musical version of The Color Purple. He had six Academy Award nominations, for composing original scores for films like In Cold Blood and The Wiz as well as a Best Picture nomination for producing Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. In 1996, Jones received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. (With his competitive Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award wins, and honorary Oscar, Jones is a non-competitive EGOT winner.)

Born in Chicago, Jones began his career playing jazz trumpet and studied briefly at the Berklee School of Music in Boston on a scholarship. The vibraphonist and bandleader Lionel Hampton lured him away from school with a gig playing trumpet and piano, but also arranging, which soon became his true métier. After a move to New York City, he became a sought-after arranger for every major jazz artist of the day, including Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Art Farmer, Clifford Brown, and Gene Krupa. He also showed his versatility, working in a more R&B mode with Ray Charles. He also took sideman gigs as he could, including as a trumpet player for CBS’s in-house TV orchestra, which explains how he ended up supporting acts like a young Elvis Presley.

Jones led Dizzy Gillespie’s group as musical director during international tours, then became musical director and finally vice president at Mercury Records in 1961, the first African-American to hold such a high position at a major label. In 1964, he composed and orchestrated his first film score, a mix of jazz and Western classical for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. He then decamped for Hollywood and blasted out a string of major scores for popular films mixing in modern jazz or blues elements—some of the greats include Mirage, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, and The Italian Job. 

It was around this time when Jones began working with Frank Sinatra as an arranger and conductor for some of his jazzier albums, like Sinatra’s collaboration with Count Basie It Might as Well Be Swing and the double-live masterpiece Sinatra at the Sands. Jones was also Sinatra’s orchestra conductor during several television appearances at this time. 

He also spent the 1960s recording under his name, including a masterpiece of orchestral jazz, The Quintessence, in 1962, which featured hardcore modern jazz instrumentalists like Phil Woods, Curtis Fuller and Freddie Hubbard working in a more composed style. Jones was also key in exposing Brazilian music to a wider audience with albums like his Big Band Bossa Nova. If you listen to the first track, “Soul Bossa Nova,” you will go “Oh, that’s the song from Austin Powers.” (Of course, Woody Allen, via Marvin Hamlisch already used it for comedy purposes in Take the Money and Run decades before Mike Myers.) He also dipped his toe into pop from time to time, and often with great success, like producing Lesley Gore’s hit “It’s My Party.”

The 1970s saw him working with more R&B artists like Rufus and The Brothers Johnson, and you should know that he wrote the harmonica-and-cowbell heavy theme to Sanford and Son. 

Working on the score to The Wiz in 1978 proved a major turn for Jones, as it was here where he met Michael Jackson, a child prodigy making great strides in his own career, but not quite at the top of the charts. Off The Wall in 1979 went to number three and 9x platinum, Thriller in 1982 is still the best-selling album of all time and is 3x diamond (aka 34x platinum) and won the Album of the Year Grammy, and Bad in 1987 went 11x platinum.  

Following this hat trick, Jones was a ubiquitous presence as a spokesperson for various philanthropic causes, and as a film and television producer. Some of his credits seem like a natural, like producing the Grammy Awards or a documentary series called Say It Loud: A Celebration of Black Music in America, while others are less expected, like co-creating the Saturday Night Live challenger MAD TV. (That’s right, Quincy Jones brought us Artie Lange.) He also co-produced The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and appeared as himself in Fantasia 2000 during the “Rhapsody in Blue” segment. Among his seven children is actress Rashida Jones. 

Jones’s extraordinary career and much of his private life (in addition to marriages to Peggy Lipton and Swedish actress Ulla Anderson, he had a longtime relationship with Nastassja Kinski) was profiled in the remarkable 1990 documentary Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. At the time of its release, Roger Ebert praised the film’s kaleidoscopic approach, comparing it to “a jazz composition.”