Quincy Jones, musical maestro and entertainment industry titan, dies at 91

Quincy Jones, a maestro of American music and a titan of the entertainment industry who influenced nearly every popular genre, produced landmark albums and earned a record 80 Grammy Award nominations, died Sunday, his publicist said.

He was 91.

Jones “passed away peacefully” Sunday night at his home in Bel Air while surrounded by his family, according to his publicist, Arnold Robinson.

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

In a prolific career that spanned more than 70 years, Jones established himself as a behind-the-scenes force and a gifted artist in his own right, working as an arranger, composer, songwriter and performer.

He left indelible imprints on jazz, pop, hip-hop and dozens of film and television soundtracks, working closely with some of the most illustrious names in the American songbook, from Count Basie and Dinah Washington to Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin and Paul Simon.

He produced Michael Jackson’s smash record “Thriller,” as well as Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “The Color Purple” and the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — projects that helped bolster his legacy as a hit-maker and media mogul.

Jones received numerous awards and accolades, including recognition at the John F. Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2010 and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2021, he joined James Brown and Otis Redding as one of the first three “foundational inductees” of the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame in Atlanta.

“As a master inventor of musical hybrids, he has mixed pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African, and Brazilian music into many dazzling fusions, traversing virtually every medium, including records, live performances, movies and television,” Obama said in his remarks.

Jones won 28 Grammys, putting him second on the list of all-time winners. He nabbed an Emmy in 1977 for writing the theme for the first episode of the miniseries “Roots” and later received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars in 1994.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933, the son of Quincy Delight Jones, a semiprofessional baseball player and carpenter, and Sarah Frances, a bank officer and apartment complex manager.

Jones was first exposed to music by his mother, who sang religious songs. She later suffered a schizophrenic breakdown; Jones’ parents eventually divorced, and his father remarried.

In the early 1940s, Jones and his family relocated to Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked with a fledgling pianist/singer by the name of Ray Charles, who was said to have helped persuade Jones to pursue his interest in the musical arts.

Jones studied briefly at the eminent Schillinger House (now known as the Berklee College of Music) in Boston in the 1950s. He then started touring with the jazz great Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger.

In time, he earned a reputation as a skilled freelance arranger. He worked with Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce (later known as Basheer Qusim), Oscar Pettiford, Dinah Washington and a host of other jazz luminaries.

He toured with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1956, traveling across the Middle East and South America, and recorded his first album as a bandleader the same year.

He worked for a spell at the Barclay record label in Paris and then led an all-star big band for the European run of Harold Arlen’s “blues opera” in two acts, “Free and Easy.”

Jones returned to the U.S. in 1961, becoming an artists-and-repertoire director for Mercury Records. Three years later, he was elevated to a vice president position there, making him one of the first Black Americans with an executive-level position at a major U.S. record company.

In the 1960s, Jones arranged and produced albums while also establishing himself as a go-to composer for film scores, first with the soundtrack for Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker” and later for Norman Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night” and Richard Brooks’ “In Cold Blood.”

He went on to create sleek, stylish scores for the original version of “The Italian Job” (1969), the satirical dramedy “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” the Steve McQueen thriller “The Getaway” and the Robert Redford caper “The Hot Rock.”

Jones’ next stop was the A&M record label, where he worked from 1969 to 1981, taking a brief hiatus as he rebounded from a brain aneurysm in 1974.

Jones’ medical condition was believed to be so dire that his friends and family began preparing for his death. He eventually attended his own memorial service alongside comedian Richard Pryor, actor Sidney Poitier and singer Marvin Gaye.

In 1975, Jones founded his own record label, Qwest Productions, signing artists like Patti Austin and the British group New Order. Three years later, he produced the soundtrack for Lumet’s movie musical “The Wiz,” a retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” starring Jackson and Diana Ross.

Jones reached a commercial zenith as the producer of a trio of Jackson records — “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” — that each sold tens of millions of copies and electrified the pop culture landscape.

“Thriller” — with its smash-hit singles, electric blend of genres and MTV-ready aesthetics — rocketed up the sales charts. It remains one of the all-time best-selling albums, a landmark that endures despite the troubling dimensions of Jackson’s personal life.

Jones was a prolific philanthropist. He helped recruit a who’s who of performers — Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder — for “We Are the World,” a 1985 charity single produced to raise money for victims of famine in Ethiopia.

In the 1980s and the 1990s, Jones branched off into other media, producing Spielberg’s version of the Alice Walker novel “The Color Purple” (1985), as well as the beloved television show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” starring Will Smith. He also launched the music magazine Vibe.

In his later years, Jones — by then a legendary figure in the entertainment industry and beyond — remained productive in the arts and philanthropic activities.

He published a memoir, “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones,” in 2001, and in 2018 he was the subject of a Netflix documentary directed by one of his daughters, the actor Rashida Jones.