More than a singular talent, Quincy Jones shifted and shaped the very culture he was a part of.
Born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, he had a rough childhood. He lost his mother to a mental institution, and lived alongside his younger brother Lloyd with an aunt who had been enslaved in Louisville, until the father moved the siblings to be with him in Seattle.
Because his stepmother did not accept him and his brother, they were often hungry. Looking for food at a recreation center, he touched a piano and decided music would be his life and threw himself into the band, learning to play various instruments, including the trumpet. At 13, he convinced the great trumpeter Clark Terry, who was touring with the great Count Basie, to give him lessons. At 14, he met 16-year-old R.C. Robinson, later known as Ray Charles.
The list of jazz luminaries Jones played with as a musician and later helped guide as an arranger and producer is an encyclopedia of the genre’s greatest stars: Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, and Betty Carter, among many others.
Jones received a total of 80 Grammy nominations in his lifetime, amassing the third-most wins with 28. He arranged Frank Sinatra’s classic “Fly Me to the Moon” with the Count Basie Orchestra, masterminded Michael Jackson’s legendary “Thriller” album, and executed arguably the biggest humanitarian single of all-time with “We Are the World,” raising money for the 1980s famine in Ethiopia.
The eighth best-selling single of all-time was conceived by Harry Belafonte, and Jones helped execute and capture the voices of nearly 50 singers across multiple genres. Among them were such juggernauts as Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, Dionne Warwick, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, good friend Ray Charles, Al Jarreau and Billy Joel, along with Lionel Richie and Jackson, who co-wrote it.
The Netflix documentary, “The Greatest Night in Pop,” chronicles the recording in colorful fashion and makes clear that Jones was to thank for getting so many icons in the same room.
Jones’ musical contributions easily fill volumes of books. Even though his footprint in film and television isn’t as large, it’s no less impactful. He was a pioneer. Even today, Black film and TV composers are rare, and in 1968, Jones broke barriers when he and songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first Black Americans nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, “The Eyes of Love” from the film “Banning.” He was also nominated for Best Original Score for “In Cold Blood,” making him the first Black American nominated twice in the same year.
He spearheaded nearly 40 projects across film and TV, including “The Color Purple,” the breakout film for Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, which he also produced and whose musical version earned him a Tony.
Jones’ film credits include the 1967 film “In the Heat of the Night,” the 1969 film “The Italian Job,” the theme song of the 1970s sitcom “Sanford and Son” starring Redd Foxx, and the soundtrack for “The Wiz,” the beloved Black cast version of the iconic “The Wizard of Oz.”
His impact was timeless — he wrote “Soul Bossa Nova” for 1964’s “The Pawnbroker” and the song would later become the theme for Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” comedy franchise in the late 1990s.
A cultural innovator, Jones, who almost lost his life to an aneurysm in the early 1970s, never rested on his laurels. Always finding a way to merge the past with the present, he embraced hip-hop music early on, and was critical to securing hip-hop’s place in mainstream pop culture throughout the 1990s as a cofounder of VIBE magazine and an executive producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” starring Will Smith, and “In the House,” starring LL Cool J alongside Debbie Allen.
Giving Black American culture its rightful place in the general American cultural landscape was extremely important to Jones. It’s a throughline in the two films on his life, “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones,” released in 1990 and which he spearheaded, and the 2018 Netflix film “Quincy,” co-written and co-directed by his multi-hyphenate daughter, Rashida Jones.
The EGOT-winner’s impact and role in molding the next generation was enormous, Will Smith said on social media Monday as news of Jones’ death spread. “Quincy Jones is the true definition of a Mentor, a Father and a Friend. He pointed me toward the greatest parts of myself. He defended me. He nurtured me. He encouraged me. He inspired me. He checked me when he needed to. He let me use his wings until mine were strong enough to fly.”
Prior to his death at age 91, Jones was still actively working on his life’s mission. In 2017, he co-launched the SVOD streamer Qwest TV, featuring live performances of jazz and other genres of music, including hip-hop and soul, often in Europe.
Most recently, he served as executive ,, along with Debbie Allen, on the documentary “King of Kings” made to give a bigger stage to the extraordinary life and legacy of legendary Chicago numbers runner Edward Jones, for whom his father once worked.
“I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music – gospel, blues, jazz and R&B – is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity,” he once said.
Jones spent his life lifting that legacy up, leaving behind a towering legacy of his own.
