It’s been said that everybody knows Quincy Jones’s name even if nobody is quite sure what Quincy Jones did. If that truism is true, there’s good reason for it. In an outsize and many-pronged career spanning the music and entertainment industries for eight decades, Jones–who, according to his publicist, “passed away peacefully” last night, at age 91–was practically everything, everywhere, all at once, and therefore nearly impossible to pin down. He was a producer, composer, arranger, instrumentalist, impresario, author, mentor, magazine founder, the celebrity father of celebrity children. Along the way, Jones might have rarely been center stage, but he imbued a head-spinning variety of musical genres—jazz, pop, R&B, easy listening—with sparkle and sophistication, all while shaping the creative trajectories of some of the titans of recorded music, among them Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Michael Jackson.
“I cook gumbo that’ll make you slap your grandmother,” Jones, an accomplished home cook, once said of his skills in the kitchen. He wielded that same magic touch in the recording studio, stirring together surprising ingredients, adding just the right amounts of spice and heat and sweetness, and invariably coming up with a feast for the ears. Put plainly, Jones was among the greatest record producers who ever lived.
Jones released 16 albums under his own name, 10 of which topped the Billboard jazz charts. As performer/composer/producer, his “Soul Bossa Nova,” from 1962, with its perky flutes and farting brass, was his best-known song: Jet Age insouciance distilled. It would go on to become a key track in the lounge-music revival of the 1990s, inextricably associated with the Austin Powers film franchise, which adopted it as a theme song. Jones was the arranger on the 1964 recording of Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” which, five years later, the Apollo 10 astronaut Eugene Cernan played on a cassette while orbiting the Moon. (The notion that Buzz Aldrin played it on the lunar surface is likely an urban—or extraterrestrial—legend, one that Jones was understandably eager to promote.)
He created soundtracks for movies (The Italian Job, In the Heat of the Night) and television (Sanford and Son). He produced Jackson’s 1982 Thriller, which remains the top-selling album of all time and one of a trilogy of Jones-produced records that cemented Jackson’s superstardom. Jones had the kind of rare industry sway that allowed him, along with ringmaster Lionel Richie, to round up the likes of Jackson, Bruce Springsteen,
Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Ray Charles, and Bob Dylan, as the conductor and co-producer (with Michael Omartian) of the all-star 1985 charity single “We Are the World.” Culture critic Greil Marcus likened the song to a Pepsi jingle, but it hauled in millions of dollars in aid for Africa. (The event was recently showcased in this year’s documentary The Greatest Night in Pop.)
Video footage of Jones working with Dylan on the song shows a producer endowed with the kind of exhortative enthusiasm you might associate with a favorite Little League coach. “A conductor and arranger has to put an emotional X-ray on the singer, and to explore their creative psyche,” Jones once said. Indeed, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, and Peggy Lee are among the many vocalists from whom he coaxed stunning performances, as he went about accumulating 80 Grammy nominations and 28 wins. Those awards sit beside an Emmy for the Roots soundtrack, an Oscar for humanitarian work, and a Tony for the 2016 revival of The Color Purple, adding up to EGOT status. (Jones co-produced the 1985 film version of The Color Purple, which helped put a talk-show host named Oprah Winfrey on the national map.)
By his own account, Jones was lucky to survive a rough-and-tumble childhood on the South Side of Chicago, where he was born in 1933. He carried an actual scar from those days: “They nailed my hand to a fence with a switchblade, man,” he would say, painting a picture of a noir boyhood in the era of Al Capone, with roving toughs doling out violence on a daily basis. His father, Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., worked as a carpenter, and his mother, who had attended Boston University and knew multiple languages, suffered from mental illness, requiring institutionalization. In one particularly grim scene from Jones’s youth, recounted in his 2001 memoir, Q, he watched in horror as she devoured her own feces. Needless to say, there was little emotional bonding between them, a void that Jones described as a factor that shaped him as an artist and human being. For a while, Jones and his younger brother, Lloyd, were sent to Kentucky to live with their paternal grandmother, formerly enslaved, who occasionally served them fried rats for dinner. Then, at 11, having relocated with his father to the Seattle area, young Quincy discovered the piano. “I’d found another mother,” he wrote in his autobiography.
He soon picked up the trumpet, the instrument that would eventually be his entry into music, and taught himself arranging. By 14 he was playing in a National Guard band (having passed himself off as 18). En route to a gig in Yakima, a car carrying Jones and four of his bandmates collided with a Trailways bus. Only Jones survived. (He later survived a pair of brain aneurysms.) After high school, he headed to Boston for a stint at the Berklee College of Music, dropped out, and was hired as a trumpeter by vibraphone legend Lionel Hampton, finding himself playing at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953. He was only 19.
His first full-length album as a bandleader came out four years later. In the midst of this run (and while also writing charts for Count Basie’s big band), Jones toggled over to a day job as an A&R man at Mercury Records. In 1963, he signed a teenage pop singer named Lesley Gore and matched her with a song: “It’s My Party.” It put Jones’s career on a new commercial plane.
But it was Sinatra, he said, who “took me to a whole new planet.” The two seemed to have an instant and unbreakable bond. “The man was bigger than life,” Jones wrote, describing the singer’s musicianship as “pure economy, power, style, and skill.” Jones would continue working with Sinatra for decades, producing his final studio album, LA Is My Lady, in 1984. “I worked with him until he passed away in ’98,” Jones recalled. “He left me his ring. I never take it off.”
His creative collaborations with Michael Jackson represented another kind of stratosphere, with Jones’s production bringing sass and sheen to the albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. Jackson became the reigning pop icon of the 1980s. But Jones’s relationship with Jackson proved to be more fragile and fraught than the one with Sinatra. In 2017, he sued Jackson’s production company for $9.4 million in unpaid royalties. (The suit was successful, but the award was later rescinded.) Jones also pointed out that he had combed through 800 songs in order to find the ones on Thriller, thereby implying that even an artist as protean as Jackson would be nowhere without great songs—and a great producer.
Jones was not shy about throwing tart opinions around, making him a dream interview for generations of journalists and documentarians. As he neared the age of 90, he decried the state of contemporary music: “It’s not going anywhere right now. It’s champagne-selling noise.” (This, from the cofounder of Vibe, a music magazine he launched to much fanfare in 1993.) He also went after sacred cows, declaring Paul McCartney “the worst bass player I ever heard.”
The 2018 Netflix documentary, Quincy, co-directed by his daughter, Rashida Jones, showed the man in full, chatty force, if somewhat hamstrung by the ravages of time and celebrity. It’s an admiring and stylish portrait, notable for its intimacy, that puts the man behind so many musical superstars front and center: a place that feels right, given his buoyant charisma and good looks. He was, after all, a noted Casanova, boasting in the film about his appetites, even as an octogenarian looking back on three marriages, including those to Swedish model-photographer-actress Ulla Andersson and Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton (mother of Rashida and Kidada), and a partnership with the actress Nastassja Kinski. He was the father of five other children (Jolie, Rachel, Martina, Quincy III, and Kenya), by four other partners, making the extended Jones family a kind of modern entertainment dynasty.
The kid from the South Side of Chicago had come a long way, with a raft of accomplishments, not to mention farflung encounters with the fabulous, the celebrated, and the historically significant that made him, as he put it, the “Ghetto Gump.” (Many of them paid tribute to Jones in 2023 at a 90th birthday bash at the Hollywood Bowl.) Twenty-four years earlier, the activist and U2 singer Bono had invited Jones along for an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. At the meeting, Jones was struck by the pontiff’s footwear, which he recalled as “burgundy wingtips.” As he went to kiss the pope’s hand, the producer blurted out, “Oh, my man’s got some pimp shoes on.” The pope, he said, “heard me.” It was impossible not to hear Quincy Jones.
