Whatever the multi-talented Quincy Jones tackled — be it jazz, pop, or film scores — became hits. He won 28 Grammys during his career and was nominated a whopping 80 times. He was the music genius behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the charity single “We Are the World,” and the cult series “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” In a career spanning 70 years, he shaped the music business, producing albums for Ray Charles, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Aznavour and U2 — just to name a few music greats.
He was the first African American to be made vice-president of a major record label, and besides musical greats, he’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.
The music legend has now died at the age of 91 on Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family. “Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the 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.”
Growing up in the ghetto
Quincy Jones’ formative years were anything but promising. His is the typical American Dream story: a boy of humble means making it to the pinnacle of the music industry by dint of sheer hard work.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933. Reeling from the economic depression, the US economy was in the doldrums. And Mafia gangster boss, Al Capone, held sway over the city.
Jones grew up in the infamous ghetto of Chicago’s South Side. He always carried a knife in his pocket ‘just in case’ and only wanted to do one thing: become a gangster.
“You want to be what you see, and that’s all I saw,” he recalls of that period in his life in the 2018 Netflix documentary, Quincy. And he had never set eyes on a white person until he was eleven years old.
A life in crime seemed predestined, until the day Jones broke into a US Army veterans’ home. A piano standing in the corner grabbed his attention. He hit the keys, and that marked the start of a great love affair. He felt “the irrepressible desire” to do something with it. And that’s how Jones ended up becoming a musician.
Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘bad dude’
His father divorced his mother after she had a schizophrenic breakdown, and later when he was 10 his father moved the family to Seattle. There, Jones met Ray Charles, two years his senior, and the two became best friends.
At 14, Jones was already performing in various bands with his buddy Charles, playing dance music in the tennis clubs of white people in the afternoons, and bebop in the city’s jazz bars at night. By 19, he was a trumpet player in Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, one of the hottest entertainers of the 1950s.
Jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie dubbed him a “bad dude,” a musician who knew all the tricks of the trade. From the very beginning, he tried his hand at composing and arranging. He performed on stage with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday and eagerly learned from his bandmates.
In 1956, Gillespie hired him as orchestra leader and took him on tour. That same year, Jones tinkered around on his own first album, “This Is How I Feel About Jazz,” in New York.
Despite his initial successes, Jones headed to Europe as jazz was still considered the inferior music of Black people in his home country. He was fortunate to secure a spot to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen — the greatest in their field — who taught him the art of composing and arranging. This knowledge would later enable him to conquer musical realms once closed off to Black musicians.
Success in every genre
Then, in 1964, Jones became vice president at Mercury, one of the leading record labels then. He was the first African American to hold such an executive position in a white-owned record company.
That same year, he produced his first album for Frank Sinatra. In 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 listened to Jones’ version of “Fly Me To The Moon” during their moon landing, as did all those who sat spellbound in front of televisions around the world. Jones also wrote film scores, including successful theme songs for the TV series Roots and for the film The Color Purple.
His stylistically confident feel for a wide variety of musical styles, from bossa nova to soul to funk, made him a much sought-after producer and conductor.
Best-selling album of all time
In 1974, Jones suffered a near-fatal cerebral aneurysm — the bursting of blood vessels leading to the brain. He was forced to give up playing the trumpet, and consequently threw himself into his work as a producer and founded his own label, Qwest Records. When he took former child star Michael Jackson under his wing, Jones finally ascended to the top of the music world.
Jackson’s first solo album, “Off the Wall” sold eight million copies, making him an international superstar, and Jones became the most sought-after record producer in Hollywood. Their second jointly produced album, “Thriller” (1982) spawned an unprecedented six Top Ten singles, including “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” It remains the best-selling album of all time, estimated to have sold more than 70 million copies worldwide.
Three years later, under Jones’ direction, the song “We Are The World” was written for the Band Aid charity project. Jones gathered Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Kenny Rogers and Tina Turner to sing on the record, and its proceeds went to the victims of the massive famine in Ethiopia in 1984-85.
Jones was always eager to experiment and was always breaking new musical ground. He had an ear for musical styles from all corners of the world: Perhaps that is why his music has effortlessly spanned decades, with hits from the 1960s still successful now.
But Jones received his share of brickbats too. He was accused of exploiting Black culture and distorting rhythms to create commercial music that was easy for white people to consume. However, it was mostly whites who accused him of betraying his Black brothers and sisters.
“With the power of music, I reach the hearts and minds of millions of people,” Jones once said. His death is unlikely to change this as the musical genius leaves behind an extensive legacy of musical gems.
This article was originally written in German.
