Musician, producer and arranger who had global hits with Michael Jackson, was the first black composer to find acceptance in Hollywood and won 28 Grammys.
From the 1980s onwards, Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was best known for his production and arranging work with Michael Jackson, not least because his efforts on Jackson’s album Thriller helped make it one of the bestselling albums in pop history. But the superstar glare surrounding his work with Jackson tended to conceal the fact that there were many more layers to Jones’s abilities.
He worked with jazz stars such as Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, became a friend and collaborator of Frank Sinatra, and developed a flourishing career as a composer of soundtracks for film and TV. He enjoyed success under his own name in styles ranging from big-band jazz and swing to pop, soul and funk. He became an influential music business executive, a successful entrepreneur in film and TV production and launched the music magazine VIBE.
He was born in Chicago, the son of Quincy Jones Sr, a carpenter and semi-pro baseball player, and his wife, Sarah (nee Wells), a building manager. His parents divorced, Quincy Sr remarried, and the family moved to Bremerton, Washington, during the second world war, then to Seattle. Quincy Jr began playing the trumpet and singing in a gospel quartet at the age of 12, and when he met up with the teenaged Ray Charles, also based in the Seattle area, Charles encouraged him to take an interest in arranging. A course at the Berklee College of Music in Boston set Jones up for his first professional job, in 1951, with the bandleader Lionel Hampton.
His experiences on the road with the Hampton band were an eye-opener. “You couldn’t stay in white hotels, and to me, coming from Seattle, a lot of this stuff was like a slap in the face,” he said. “Back then, all the black bands had white bus drivers so they could eat, ’cos you couldn’t go into white restaurants. Even in Philadelphia, they had segregated hotels.” Jones left Hampton in 1953, having accompanied the band on a European tour and rubbed shoulders with a remarkable lineup of musicians including the trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer.
He set about making a living writing arrangements for jazz luminaries including Basie and Tommy Dorsey. Although Jones put in a stint as musical director for Gillespie’s ensemble in 1956, he was aware that the days of the big bands were numbered, and rock’n’roll was coming. “In a funny way, Lionel Hampton was one of the bands that was serious with a rock’n’roll sensibility, before we even knew what the word meant,” Jones said.
During 1957 and 1958, Jones based himself in France and Scandinavia. He continued to study composition – notably with Nadia Boulanger, mentor of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, among others – and took a job with Barclay Disques, the Paris-based subsidiary of Mercury Records. While in Europe he formed a star-studded big band of his own, and spent two years touring Europe and the US. He wrote material for Count Basie, and during the late 1950s and early 60s worked as an arranger and music director on recording sessions for vocalists including Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan.
In 1964, Jones won his first Grammy award, for his arrangement of Basie’s recording of the Don Gibson song I Can’t Stop Loving You. He also produced four million-selling singles for Lesley Gore, including the US chart-topper and UK Top 10 hit It’s My Party (1963). His hectic career was matched by an equally eventful private life. In his memoir Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (2001), he described how at one point he was dating five women at the same time.
His burgeoning profile was boosted by collaborations with Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Andy Williams. Jones’s association with Sinatra produced the albums It Might As Well Be Swing (1964) and Sinatra at the Sands (1966), both featuring Basie’s band. Jones and Sinatra became close friends, Jones later writing that Sinatra was “hip, straight up and straight ahead, and above all, a monster musician”.
Jones’s track record gained him entry into the lucrative fields of film and television, and he became the first black composer to find acceptance within Hollywood. Throughout the late 60s and 70s he was commissioned to write scores for more than 30 movies and hundreds of TV shows. Among his better-known film projects are In Cold Blood (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Italian Job (1969) and The Getaway (1972). The theme from Ironside is his most instantly recognisable effort for the small screen, but his compositions for The Bill Cosby Show, Sanford and Son and his Emmy-winning work for the miniseries Roots proved enduringly popular.
As the 70s wore on, Jones displayed his instinct for moving with prevailing musical trends by immersing himself in funk and disco music. His album Body Heat, from 1974, featured the Brothers Johnson as the rhythm section, and Jones subsequently produced bestselling albums by the Brothers Johnson themselves.
Despite undergoing surgery to deal with twin brain aneurysms in 1974, Jones continued to work at a furious pace. He produced chart-busting albums for the disco queen Donna Summer and soul diva Aretha Franklin, and he found another musical soulmate in the guitarist George Benson. Their collaboration on Give Me the Night (1980) – the debut release on Jones’s Qwest label – was another career benchmark, the album reaching No 3 on the US album chart while the title track was a No 4 single.
Meanwhile Jones had hits under his own name. He had a US Top 30 success with Stuff Like That (1978), and in 1981 scored a Top 10 album with The Dude, which spun off the Top 30 hit Ai No Corrida (No 4 in the UK), and the Top 20 hits Just Once and One Hundred Ways, both featuring James Ingram. In 1998, the hit movie Austin Powers prompted a revival of Quincy’s 1962 hip-shaker, Soul Bossa Nova; it was also used as a theme for the 1998 football World Cup in France.
Jones first met Michael Jackson, then aged 12, at Davis Jr’s house, but it was not until Jones was working on the soundtrack for the film The Wiz (1978), starring Jackson and Diana Ross, that he was invited to produce a Jackson solo album. This was the 20m-selling Off the Wall (1979). Their collaboration continued with Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987), the trio selling 100m copies between them. In between, Jones was also the natural choice to produce the 1985 charity single, We Are the World, co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie and performed by the all-star USA For Africa to benefit Ethiopian famine victims.
Jones was a pivotal figure in helping musicians take control of the business side of their work. Like most other musicians, he had grown accustomed in the early years of his career to having his royalties and copyrights appropriated by unscrupulous publishers or record labels. “If you write a song, the publishing is 50% of that,” Jones explained. “They would say: ‘I want 50% of your creation’, so that means you get 25%. That was normal.” He began to see the light when he took a job as A&R man at Mercury Records in New York in 1961. Within two years, he was made a vice-president, making him the first high-level black executive of a major record label. “I’d lost so much money when I had my band [the Jones Boys] in Europe that I had to go with a record company. That’s when I said: ‘I’d better pay attention to the other side, because it is a music business.’”
After moving from Mercury to A&M Records he launched Qwest, which became home to such varied artists as New Order, Milt Jackson, the Winans and Tevin Campbell. Qwest also did excellent business with the soundtracks to Malcolm X (1992) and the rap-generation movie Boyz N the Hood (1991).
Growing into the role of entertainment mogul, Jones co-produced Steven Spielberg’s film of The Color Purple in 1985 and produced its soundtrack. In 1990 he teamed up with Time Warner Inc to form Quincy Jones Entertainment; in 1991 he helped create the NBC television series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which launched Will Smith on the road to superstardom; and in 1993 he set up VIBE. He headed a consortium of businessmen that formed Qwest Broadcasting, which purchased TV stations in Atlanta and New Orleans.
Jones won an Emmy, 28 Grammys and three Special Grammy awards, including the Grammy Legend award in 1992, was given the Sammy Cahn lifetime achievement award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. He was showered with honorary doctorates, Time magazine declared him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century, and in 1990 he was made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, promoted to commander in 2001.
He was celebrated in the film Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (1990) and the documentary Quincy (2018), directed by his daughter Rashida.
Three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Jolie, from the first, to Jeri Caldwell; a daughter, Martina, and son, Quincy, from the second, to Ulla Andersson; two daughters, Rashida and Kikada, from the third, to Peggy Lipton; and by a daughter, Kenya, from a relationship with Nastassja Kinski, and a daughter, Rachel, with Carol Reynolds.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr, musician, producer, composer and arranger, born 14 March 1933; died 3 November 2024
This article was amended on 6 November 2024 to clarify that Count Basie’s recording of I Can’t Stop Loving You was originally composed by Don Gibson.
