Quincy Jones

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was an American record producer, composer, arranger, record executive, conductor, trumpeter, film and television producer and bandleader. During his seven-decade career, he received dozens of accolades, including 28 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for seven Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.

Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including "It's My Party") and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and the jazz artist Count Basie. Jones produced three of the most successful albums by Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.

Jones composed numerous film scores including for The Pawnbroker (1965), In the Heat of the Night (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), The Italian Job (1969), The Wiz (1978), and The Color Purple (1985). He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the miniseries Roots (1977). He received a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical as a producer for the revival of The Color Purple (2016).

Jones received many honorary awards, including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, and the Academy Honorary Award in June 2024. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time.

Early life and education

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the elder of two sons to Sara Frances (née Wells; Later Taylor; 1904–1999), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones (1895–1971), a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. Quincy Jr.'s paternal grandmother was an ex-slave from Louisville, and he later discovered that his paternal grandfather was Welsh.

Furthermore, Jones said, "He had a baby with my great-grandmother [a slave], and my [maternal] grandmother was born there [on a plantation in Kentucky]. We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams." Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them.

For the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives, Jones had his DNA tested and genealogists researched his family history again. His DNA revealed he was mostly African, but also had 34% European ancestry on both sides of his family. Research showed that he had English, French, Italian, and Welsh ancestry through his father. His mother's side was of West and Central African descent, specifically from the Tikar people of Cameroon. His mother also had European ancestry, including Lanier male ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, making him eligible for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his ancestors was Elizabeth Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington.

Jones's family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Jones had a younger brother, Lloyd, who was an engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV until his death in 1998. Jones was introduced to music by his mother who always sang religious songs, and next-door neighbor Lucy Jackson. When Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, and he would listen through the walls. Jackson recalled that after he heard her playing one day, she could not get him off her piano.

When Jones was young, his mother had a schizophrenic breakdown and was sent to a mental institution. His father divorced her and married Elvera Jones, who already had three children: Waymond, Theresa, and Katherine. Elvera and Quincy Sr. had three more children together: Jeanette, Margie, and Richard. The family moved to Sinclair Park, a segregated community in Bremerton, Washington, in 1943. Jones's father took a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

After the war, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School and developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger. His classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle's first society jazz bandleaders. Jones and Taylor began playing music together,

At the age of fourteen, Jones joined Taylor's group playing Seattle's Washington Social Club, the Black Elks Club, and all over the Northwest, backing Billie Holiday and Billy Eckstine. He met Ray Charles, then an unknown 16-year-old musician from Florida going by R.C. Robinson, playing bebop piano and alto sax and singing like Nat Cole.

Jones credited his father's sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed, and his loving nature with holding the family together. Jones cited his father's rhyming motto: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all."

Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University in 1951. After one semester, he transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship, where he played at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important influences.

Career

1953–1959: Career beginnings with jazz music

In 1953, at age 20, Jones traveled with jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton for a European tour of the Hampton orchestra. He said the tour changed his view of racism in the United States, "It gave you some sense of perspective on past, present, and future. It took the myopic conflict between just black and white in the United States and put it on another level because you saw the turmoil between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Cypriots and the Greeks, and the Swedes and the Danes, and the Koreans and the Japanese. Everybody had these hassles, and you saw it was a basic part of human nature, these conflicts. It opened my soul; it opened my mind."

After leaving the Hampton band in 1954, Jones settled in New York, and started writing "for anyone who would pay". In early 1956, he accepted a temporary job at CBS' Stage Show hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey that was broadcast live from Studio 50 in New York City (known today as the Ed Sullivan Theater). On January 28, February 4, 11 and 18, as well as on March 17 and 24, Jones played second trumpet in the studio band that supported 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his first six television appearances. Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel", which became his first No. 1 record and the Billboard magazine Pop Record of the year. Soon after, as a trumpeter and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, Jones went on tour of the Middle East and South America sponsored by the United States Information Agency. After returning, he signed a contract with ABC-Paramount and started his recording career as the leader of his band. In 1957, he moved to Paris, where he studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and performed at the Paris Olympia. Jones became music director at Barclay, a French record company (and the licensee for Mercury in France).

In the 1950s, Jones toured Europe with several jazz orchestras. As musical director of Harold Arlen's jazz musical Free and Easy, he took to the road again. With musicians from the Arlen show, he formed his big band, The Jones Boys, with eighteen musicians. The band included double bass player Eddie Jones and trumpeter Reunald Jones. None of the three were related. The band toured North America and Europe, and the concerts met enthusiastic audiences and sparkling reviews, but the earnings failed to support a band of this size. Poor budget planning resulted in an economic disaster. The band dissolved, leaving Jones in a financial crisis. "We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That's when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two." Irving Green, head of Mercury, helped Jones with a personal loan and a job as musical director of the company's New York division.