Quincy Jones, celebrated music producer to stars, dies at 91

He scored more than 30 films and produced some of the world’s most popular records, and his family say ‘there will never be another like him’.

Quincy Jones has died, aged 91.

Quincy Jones, a ­voracious music lover and jazz musician who played myriad instruments, scored more than 30 films and produced some of the world’s most popular records, has died. He was 91.

The multi-Grammy-winning ­musician and composer died peacefully late on Sunday (Monday AEDT) at his Bel-Air home, surrounded by family, his publicist, Arnold Robinson, said. “Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” his family said in a statement. “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.”

Gregarious and candid with a mischievous smirk, Jones’ life itself embodied the course of music history: he was teenage buddies with Ray Charles, musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, arranger for Ella Fitzgerald and the ringleader behind Miles Davis’ last major performance that ­became the live album Miles & ­Quincy Live at Montreux.

The child of Chicago’s south side produced everyone from Aretha Franklin to Celine Dion, and triggered a cultural earthquake in launching the solo career of Michael Jackson – a ­musical marriage that produced Thriller and changed pop forever.

Jones produced the late pop star Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Bad and Thriller, the second-best-selling album of all time, according to the ­Recording Industry Association of America. He forged his connection with Jackson after helping produce the music for The Wiz, the Broadway adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that starred the pop singer and singer Diana Ross. Jones also devoted much of his life to social causes, pioneering a model of celebrity activism when he produced the song We Are the World in 1985, conducting 46 big-name artists to perform it to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief.

Michael Jackson with Quincy Jones in 1984.

In 2004, he organised a similar concert to raise money for his We Are the Future youth programs throughout Africa, his sense of humanitarian duty first triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, whom he’d met in his 20s.

A hundred years from now, the “wonder will be that one man could have fit so much music into one lifetime”, wrote Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2, in his introduction to Jones’s 2008 memoir called The Complete Quincy Jones.

The Irish star travelled to Rome with Jones to meet Pope John Paul II in 1999 for a global debt-relief campaign. He recalled that while he felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the meeting, Jones was more impressed by the frail pope’s stylish footwear, whispering to Bono: “Check … out … the shoes.”

“The intense warmth of the man himself offered a new kind of sexiness to the way a music mogul could carry himself,” Bono wrote.

Jones was born in Chicago and was raised primarily by his father, a carpenter, who struggled to put food on the table. Jones and his siblings sometimes ate rats fried by their grandmother, chewed tar instead of gum and once sated their hunger by eating a pack of cough drops, according to his autobiography.

Jones in 1960.

Jones in 2011. Picture: AAP

Jones drew musical inspiration from his mother, who sang religious songs around the house, but she suffered from schizophrenia and was put in a mental institution when he was seven years old.

Jones became obsessed with all forms of music from an early age, poring over music instruction books and briefly taking a job at a brothel located beneath a juke joint to soak in the tunes. His family moved to Seattle when he was 10, and it was there he picked up piano, followed soon by the tuba, sousaphone, trumpet, trombone and other horns, so that he could march at the front of the school band.

At the age of 14 he became fast friends with Ray Charles. The blind soul musician would give Jones piano lessons in the dark, fry him chicken and introduce him to the concept of orchestration.

Ray Charles and Quincy Jones in 1986. Picture: John Barrett/ZUMA Wire

He studied for short stints on scholarship at Seattle University, where fellow student Clint Eastwood recalled him as a “chick magnet”, and at what is now known as Boston’s Berklee College of Music. But Jones quickly gravitated to the New York jazz scene, where his mentors included bebop greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

The 1950s saw him head back on tour, in particular to Europe. He played second trumpet on Elvis ­Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, teaming with Gillespie for several years before moving to Paris in 1957, where he studied under the legendary composer Nadia Boulanger.

Jones expanded into Hollywood, scoring films and television shows. He wrote his own hits, like the addictively cacophonous Soul Bossa Nova, while also arranging at a breathless pace for dozens of stars across the ­industry.

The musician began working with Frank Sinatra, for whom he arranged the most famous version of the oft-covered Fly Me To The Moon, and forged a musical and personal relationship with the crooner that would continue until the singer’s death.

“You name it, Quincy’s done it. He’s been able to take this genius of his and translate it into any kind of sound that he chooses,” jazz pianist Herbie Hancock told PBS in 2001.

“He is fearless. If you want Quincy to do something, you tell him that he can’t do it. And of course he will – he’ll do it.”

He scraped by financially for years while touring with prominent jazz ­orchestras before taking a job as an executive at Mercury Records. He began composing film scores with 1964’s The Pawnbroker.

He continued scoring films and TV shows for decades, including The Cosby Show, Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple and The Italian Job. He was executive producer of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for which his son, Quincy Jones III, also composed some of the theme music. All the while he continued composing his own hits such as 1962’s bubbly Soul Bossa Nova, which got a second wind in the Austin Powers films, and arranging music for the likes of Sinatra.

The Edge and Bono of U2 with Quincy Jones and photographer Herman Leonard backstage during the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz honoring B.B. King event held at the Kodak Theatre in 2008. Picture: Michael Buckner/Getty Images

Bono credited Jones with bringing out the best in artists he produced “by making everyone around him want to be themselves”.

While recording with Michael Jackson, whom Jones called “Smelly” because he referred to music he liked as “smelly jelly”, Jones said they would know they’d struck gold on a song when they both felt goosebumps. But Jones struggled to pare down their excess material, with Jackson constantly protesting: “Oh no, that’s the jelly.”

Jones’ roller-coaster personal life twisted and swerved nearly as often as his career. He had three wives, the ­actors Jeri Caldwell and Peggy Lipton, along with Ulla Andersson, a Swedish actor and former model.

Jones had a son and six daughters, including actors Rashida Jones and Kidada Jones, who entered the spotlight when she dated the late rap star Tupac Shakur.

Among entertainment’s most decorated figures, Jones received almost every major lifetime achievement award, including 28 Grammy Awards. He also won an Emmy, a Tony and an honorary Oscar.

In a documentary, his daughter Rashida asked Jones how he kept his ego in check while living such a ­remarkable life.

“You have to dream so big that you can’t get an ego, because you can’t fulfil all those dreams,” he told her.

The Wall Street Journal

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: AFP