(Bloomberg) -- Quincy Jones, who broke through musical and business barriers during more than six decades as a performer, composer, arranger and media executive, has died. He was 91.
Jones died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family, according to a statement from his publicist Arnold Robinson.
Jones leveraged his jazz roots and a legendary knack for getting the best out of pop artists to become one of the most influential music producers of the 20th century. From a background as a jazz trumpeter, Jones broadened his horizons into pop, rock, rhythm and blues, rap and hip-hop. He produced some 90 recordings, including Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album ever released, and We Are the World, the all-star benefit single.
He was tutored by jazz legend Count Basie and was friends with Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra. Jones worked with musicians as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Lesley Gore, and Paul Simon and wrote dozens of film scores and theme songs for television shows such as Sanford and Son.
Jones was ultimately nominated for 80 Grammy Awards and won 28. He won a 1977 Emmy Award for composing the music for Roots, the acclaimed TV miniseries about the lives of an American slave family.
He became the first Black executive at a major recording label when Mercury Records named him vice president in the 1960s, and later ran his own label, Qwest. He also produced movies and TV shows — with credits that included the film The Color Purple and the TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air — and owned magazines and TV stations.
His personal life was complicated, and Jones described himself as a “dog” in some relationships. He told GQ Magazine in a 2018 interview that he had 22 girlfriends scattered around the world.
He was married three times and had seven children, many going into music, acting and modeling.
Descendant of Slaves
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on March 14, 1933, in Chicago to descendants of slaves from a Mississippi plantation. His father worked as a carpenter. His mother, Sarah Wells Jones, was an apartment manager who played piano and sang in church.
Jones described his mother as brilliant and well-educated, but said she suffered from a mental illness and spent time in state hospitals. He and his younger brother, Lloyd, lived with their grandmother in Louisville, Kentucky, during her absences. His father eventually married again and relocated the family to Washington state.
Growing up, Jones tried the piano, sousaphone and other instruments before picking the trumpet. He sneaked into jazz clubs where he met Basie and took lessons from Clark Terry, one of the bandleader’s trumpet players.
He gave up a scholarship to Schillinger House in Boston, now called the Berklee College of Music, to tour with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Afterward he moved to New York to write arrangements for jazz musicians, including Basie.
Jeri Caldwell, his high-school sweetheart, went to New York to live with him. The couple had a daughter — Jolie, who became a jazz singer — in 1953. Four years later, they were wed, the first of Jones’s three marriages.
Dizzy Gillespie, also a trumpeter, hired him in 1956 as musical director for a State Department-sponsored international tour. When those shows ended, he recorded his first album.
Paris Journey
Jones moved to Paris the next year. From there, he toured Europe with Free and Easy, a jazz musical. When the show ended, he continued performing around the continent for ten months with its musicians and amassed $145,000 in debt. He credited the experience with teaching him the difference between music and the music business.
Irving Green, Mercury’s president, loaned him money to stay afloat. Mercury hired him as a producer and made him a vice president the next year. In 1963, he produced Lesley Gore’s It’s My Party, a No. 1 hit on Billboard magazine’s pop singles chart. That year, Jones also wrote his first film score, for The Pawnbroker.
In 1974, Jones had a brain aneurysm that required two major surgeries that he described as a moment of reckoning when he calculated the number of days he likely had left.
“It brought a reality into my soul that I’d never thought about before,” Jones said in a 2001 interview with PBS. “It pushes the feeling of doing your job every time like it’s the first time and living every day like it’s the last time.”
That same year, he released Body Heat, an album that climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues and jazz charts and reached the top 10 on the pop charts. The tracks have been sampled and referenced by artists in more than 20 songs since, according to the WhoSampled music database, including rappers Tupac Shakur and YG.
He repeated that feat 15 years later with Back on the Block, which added rap and hip-hop to the mix and featured the final studio recordings by singers Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
The Color Purple
The 1985 film The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg and featuring Oprah Winfrey in her film debut, brought Jones into movie production for the first time.
He later moved into TV with the help of Time Warner Inc., which backed his production company in 1990. Three years later, he merged the enterprise with one headed by another producer, David Salzman.
The combined company owned Vibe, an urban entertainment magazine that Jones started in 1993, along with TV stations in Atlanta and New Orleans. Independently, Jones co-owned Spin, a rock-music magazine, until 2006.
Qwest, a label that focused on rhythm and blues, was the product of a 1980 venture between Jones and Warner Bros. Records. Warner bought out his stake and closed the label in 2001.
“It’s one thing to find a person who is a brilliant creator and composer,” Henry Louis Gates, the head of Harvard University’s Black studies program, told Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “It’s another to find a person who is just as brilliant as an entrepreneur.”
Jones received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1994 Academy Awards for his activism. He’d also received both the Kennedy Center Honors and France’s Legion d’honneur in recognition of his musical career. In 2013, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
(Updates with additional background throughout)
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