Quincy Jones, the jazz trumpeter turned composer, arranger, producer and facilitator for a wide range of artists and musical styles, has died at 91.
Born on the South Side of Chicago and reared in the Seattle area, schooled at what is now Berkelee College of Music in Boston, Jones went on to study in Paris with the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. (He was one of her last surviving pupils.) He worked as an arranger and trumpeter with a number of jazz musicians – Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis – and led his own band in the 1950s.
In 1961, Jones became musical director of Mercury Records, producing recordings by a number of artists in the pre-Beatles heyday of American popular music. He worked for years with Ray Charles, whom he had known since both were aspiring teenaged musicians.
Jones also wrote and arranged for musical theater productions and films. His scores for films, notably the Sidney Poitier drama “In the Heat of the Night,” established Jones as a go-to figure for music in Hollywood. His other film scores include those for “The Pawnbroker,” “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple.”
His most stellar production credit was Michael Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller,” the best-selling pop recording of all time.
In later life, Jones worked with a number of hip-hop artists. And, while his career increasingly centered on arranging and producing records for others, Jones continued to perform and record as a bandleader.
From the 1960s onward, Jones was active in the civil-rights movement and in projects documenting and promoting Black musicians’ role in American music. He was the recipient of a National Medal of Arts and numerous other honors.
“Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets,” Ben Ratliff writes in an obituary in The New York Times: