Born: March 14th, 1933
Died: November 3rd, 2024
The career of Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was an odyssey like few others in the pantheon of popular music. In a dazzling, decades-long run of creative and commercial success, he established himself as a kingpin of many genres: jazz, pop, R&B, funk, disco, film scores and more. Above all else, however, he is remembered as the man who produced the biggest-selling record in history: Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Jones’s artistic journey was an eventful and glitzy one. A jazz bandleader in the 1950s and 1960s, he later moved into the world of film soundtracks, produced multimillion-selling records, presided over his own label and built a TV production and publishing empire. At the time of his death, he was worth an estimated half a billion dollars.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr was born on March 14th, 1933 – the same day as his subsequent close friend, the actor Michael Caine – in Chicago. His parents Quincy Sr and Sara were, respectively, a semi-pro baseball player and carpenter, and a bank worker. When he was a small child, Sara suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to an institution; his father remarried and moved the family to Washington State.
Entering the music business aged 17 as a precocious arranger, Jones learned an early lesson when the legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker failed to pay him back a loan. Before long, he found work with big names such as Dinah Washington and Tommy Dorsey, then joined Lionel Hampton’s orchestra as a trumpeter and toured Europe with Count Basie. In 1956, the legendary Dizzy Gillespie’s ensemble hired him as musical director.
Jones released his first album, This Is How I Feel About Jazz, in 1957. His 1962 release, Big Band Bossa Nova, contained what would come to be regarded as his signature tune, the chirpy, Latin-flavoured instrumental Soul Bossa Nova.
Jones had now become a bona fide mover and shaker in musical circles. In the mid-1960s, he produced four million-selling singles for British singer Lesley Gore; and a long-running creative relationship with Frank Sinatra peaked in 1966 when he conducted and arranged the elegant live album Sinatra at the Sands. He also branched out into film scores, beginning with Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker in 1961; his credits over the next decade and a half included soundtracks for The Getaway, In the Heat of the Night, Roots, The Italian Job, The Anderson Tapes and In Cold Blood.
The 1970s saw Jones survive a brain aneurysm and make some of the most compelling music of his career. He produced the soundtrack for The Wiz, a film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Its star, Michael Jackson, asked Jones if he knew any potential producers for Jackson’s next album. Jones volunteered his own services, and despite the misgivings of Epic Records (who felt Jones was too jazzy for it to work), Off the Wall was a spectacular success, launching Jackson as a household-name solo artist.
An irresistible collection of disco anthems penned by Jackson and the low-profile English songwriter Rod Temperton, Off The Wall was given a heady gloss by Jones’s mixing-desk magic. “Everybody said, ‘You can’t make Michael any bigger than he was in the Jackson Five,’” Jones recalled. “I said, ‘We’ll see.’”
Released in August 1979, the record went triple platinum in the US within months.
Unwilling to rest on his laurels, Jones then worked on a string of accomplished R&B albums by Rufus and Chaka Khan, George Benson, The Brothers Johnson, Patti Austin and Donna Summer. In 1980 he founded Qwest Records, a label whose roster contained artists as varied as Sinatra and New Order. The following year, he released the well-received album The Dude under his own name. Then came Thriller.
Jones spent most of 1982 in a studio where Jackson’s outlandish menagerie of pets roamed free (to his displeasure), and endured sleep deprivation as he toiled to make the record sound as close to perfect as possible. “That’s where the creative stuff comes in, the unconscious mind,” he said. “It was tough. But we did it.” Songwriter James Ingram recalled how Jones often fell asleep on the mixing board, awaking to answer a question: “He works in the alpha state a lot.” Jones’s imaginative ideas – bringing in Eddie Van Halen to play a rock guitar solo on Beat It, hiring horror movie legend Vincent Price for a spooky voiceover on the title track – helped turn a very good record into a legendary one.
Released in November 1982, Thriller exploded like no record before or since, with all seven of its singles cracking the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. At one point in early 1983, it was shifting a million copies per week, and is today estimated to have broken the 100 million barrier. (An ungrateful Jackson tried to block Jones’s Grammy nomination for Thriller, arguing that “this is my record”; Epic Records refused, and Jones won Best Producer.)
Jones shaped many more hits as the 1980s rolled on. He also oversaw the USA For Africa charity single We Are the World, later recalling the “power” he felt as he commanded a studio full of guesting superstars. But this stratospheric success took a psychological toll, and his marriage to actress Peggy Lipton began to crumble as he became hooked on sleeping pills.
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After composing the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s drama The Color Purple, he fled to Tahiti, where he kicked his addiction. In 1987, Jones patched up his differences with Jackson to produce the follow-up to Thriller. The result, Bad, was an awkward and unsatisfying mélange that lacked cohesion. Though reviews were mixed, it moved seven million copies in its first week of release anyway, making it the fastest-selling album ever.
With his fortune amassed and his reputation unassailable, Jones moved into TV. He set up the production company Quincy Jones Entertainment, which was behind NBC’s hugely successful Will Smith sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, giving him another lucrative revenue stream for the rest of his life. He also organised Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration concert in 1993 and the Academy Awards telecast in 1996.
In retirement, Jones occasionally courted controversy by making waspishly provocative comments about other musicians in interviews, and raised eyebrows in 2009 by dating an Egyptian fashion designer 52 years his junior. He was married three times, to Jeri Caldwell (1957-1966), Ulla Andersson (1967-1974) and Peggy Lipton (1974-1990). He is survived by seven children, including the actress Rashida Jones and the music producer Quincy Jones III.