Quincy Jones, producer and entertainment star, dies at 91 | Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones, a titan of American entertainment who worked with stars from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and Will Smith, has died aged 91.

Jones' publicist, Arnold Robinson, said he died Sunday evening at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

“Tonight it is with full but broken hearts that we share the news of the passing of our father and brother Quincy Jones,” the family said in a statement. “And while this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life he led and know there will never be another like him.”

Jones was arguably the most versatile pop culture figure of the 20th century, perhaps best known for producing the albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad for Michael Jackson in the 1980s, which made the singer the biggest pop star of all time made. Jones also produced music for Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and many others.

He was also a successful composer of dozens of film scores and had numerous chart hits under his own name. Jones was a bandleader in big band jazz, an arranger for jazz stars like Count Basie and a multi-instrumentalist who was best at trumpet and piano. His television and film production company, founded in 1990, had great success with the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and other shows, and he continued to innovate well into his 80s, launching Qwest TV, an on-demand service, in 2017 -Music television service. Jones is third only to Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the most Grammy nominations of all time (80 to 88 each) and is the third-most winner of the awards with 28.

Jones was born in Chicago in 1933. His half-white father was the son of a Welsh slave owner and one of his slaves, while his mother's family was also descended from slave owners. His introduction to music came through the walls of his parents' home, via a neighbor's piano, which he began learning at the age of seven, and through his mother's singing.

His parents divorced and he moved with his father to Washington state, where Jones learned to play drums and a variety of brass instruments in his high school band. At age 14, he began playing in a band with 16-year-old Ray Charles in Seattle clubs, once in 1948 opening for Billie Holiday. He studied music at Seattle University, moved east to continue his studies in Boston, then moved to New York after being rehired by jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton, with whom he had toured as a high school student (a band, for whom Malcolm X was a hero). dealer when they played in Detroit).

In New York, he played trumpet in Elvis Presley's band during his first TV appearances and met the stars of the flourishing bebop movement, including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. (Years later, in 1991, Jones conducted Davis' final performance, two months before his death.)

Jones toured Europe with Hampton and spent much time there in the 1950s, including a period of further study in Paris, where he met luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. At the age of 23, he also toured South America and the Middle East as Dizzy Gillespie's musical director and arranger. He assembled a top team for his own big band and toured Europe to test Free and Easy, a jazz musical, but the disastrous success left Jones, by his own admission, on the verge of suicide and $100,000 in debt .

He secured a job at Mercury Records and gradually paid off the debt with plenty of work as a producer and arranger for artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Sammy Davis Jr. including “The Italian Job”, ” In the Heat of the Night,” “The Getaway,” and “The Color Purple.” (He produced the last of these, which was nominated for 11 Oscars, three of them for Jones himself.) In 1968, he became the first African American to be nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars (alongside songwriter Bob Russell) for The Eyes of Love from the film Banning. ; In total he had seven nominations. For television he composed programs such as “The Bill Cosby Show”, “Ironside” and “Roots”.

His collaboration with Sinatra began in 1958 when he was commissioned by Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, to conduct and arrange Sinatra and his band for a charity event. Jones and Sinatra continued to work on projects until Sinatra's final album, LA Is My Lady, was released in 1984. Jones' solo musical career began in the late 1950s, when he recorded albums under his own name as a bandleader for jazz ensembles that included luminaries such as Charles Mingus, Art Pepper and Freddie Hubbard.

Jones once said of his time in Seattle, “When people write about music, jazz is in this box, R&B is in this box, pop is in that box, but we did it all,” and his Catholic tastes served him as well as modern pop mutated from the swing era. In the mid-'60s he produced four million-selling hits for New York singer Lesley Gore, including US number 1 It's My Party, and later turned to funk and disco, producing hit singles such as George Benson's Give Me the Night and Patti Austin James Ingram's Baby Come to Me as well as records by the band Rufus and Chaka Khan and the Brothers Johnson. Jones also released his own funk material, charting in the US Top 10 with “Body Heat” (1974) and “The Dude” (1981).

His greatest success in this style was his collaboration with Michael Jackson: “Thriller” remains the best-selling album of all time, while Jones' versatility between “Off the Wall” and “Bad” allowed Jackson to metamorphose from smooth disco to ultra-synthetic funk rock. He and Jackson (along with Lionel Richie and producer Michael Omartian) also fronted We Are the World, a successful charity single that raised funds for the Ethiopian famine in 1985. “I lost my little brother today and a part of my soul went with him,” Jones said when Jackson died in 2009. In 2017, Jones' legal team successfully argued that he was owed $9.4 million in unpaid Jackson royalties, although he lost on appeal in 2020 and was required to repay $6.8 million.

After the success of The Color Purple in 1985, he founded the film and television production company Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990. His biggest screen success was the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran for 148 episodes and launched the career of Will Smith; Other shows included the LL Cool J sitcom In the House and the long-running sketch comedy show MadTV.

He also founded the media company Qwest Broadcasting and, in collaboration with Time Inc., the Black music magazine Vibe in 1993. Throughout his career, he supported numerous charities and causes, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Jazz Foundation of America and others, and mentored young musicians, including British multiple Grammy winner Jacob Collier.

Jones' illustrious career was almost cut short twice: he narrowly escaped being assassinated by Charles Manson's cult in 1969 because he had planned to go to Sharon Tate's house on the night of the murder, but Jones forgot the appointment. He also survived a brain aneurysm in 1974, which prevented him from playing the trumpet again as the strain was expected to cause further damage.

Jones was married three times for nine years until 1966, first to his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell, and became a father to his daughter Jolie. In 1967 he married Ulla Andersson and had a son and a daughter. In 1974, he divorced and married actress Peggy Lipton, best known for her roles in The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. They had two daughters, including actress Rashida Jones, before divorcing in 1989. He had two other children: Rachel with the dancer Carol Reynolds and Kenya, his daughter with the actress Nastassja Kinski.

He never married again, but continued to date a number of younger women and caused a stir with his year-long partnership with 19-year-old Egyptian designer Heba Elawadi, aged 73. He has also claimed to have dated Ivanka Trump and Juliette Gréco. He leaves behind his seven children.