They say everyone knows Quincy Jonesalthough no one knows exactly what Quincy Jones did. If this truism is true, there are good reasons for it. In an outsized, multifaceted career spanning the music and entertainment industries for eight decades, Jones – who, according to his publicist, “passed away peacefully” last night, at the age of 91 – was virtually everything, everywhere, at once, and therefore almost impossible to pin down. He was a producer, composer, arranger, instrumentalist, impresario, author, mentor, magazine founder, famous father of famous children. Throughout his career, Jones may have rarely taken center stage, but he has imbued a variety of stunning musical genres (jazz, pop, R&B, easy listening) with brilliance and sophistication, while shaping the creative trajectories of some of the world’s titans. recorded music, including Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson.

“I cook gumbo that will make you slap your grandmother,” Jones, an accomplished home cook, once said of his cooking skills. He used that same magical touch in the recording studio, mixing surprising ingredients, adding just the right amount of spice, tang and sweetness, and invariably creating a treat for the ears. Simply put, Jones was one of the greatest record producers of all time.

Jones has released 16 albums under his own name, 10 of which topped the Billboard jazz charts. As a singer/songwriter/producer, his 1962 “Soul Bossa Nova,” with its cheery flutes and blaring brass, was his best-known song: Jet Age carefreeness distilled. It would become a key piece of the lounge music revival of the 1990s, inextricably associated with Powers of Austin film franchise, which adopted it as its theme song. Jones was the arranger for the 1964 recording of Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” which five years later Apollo 10 Astronaut Eugene Cernan played on a tape while in orbit around the Moon. (The idea that Buzz Aldrin played on the lunar surface is probably an urban – or extraterrestrial – legend that Jones was understandably keen to promote.)

He has created soundtracks for films (Italian work, In the heat of the night) and television (Sanford and Sons). He produced Jackson’s 1982 Thrillerwhich remains the best-selling album of all time and is part of a trilogy of Jones-produced records that cemented Jackson’s superstardom. Jones had the kind of influence rare in the industry that allowed him and the ringmaster Lionel Richie, to bring people like Jackson together, Bruce Springsteen,

Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Ray Charles, and Bob Dylanas conductor and co-producer (with Michael Omartien) from the 1985 all-star charity single “We are the world.” Cultural criticism Greil Marcus compared the song to a Pepsi jingle, but it brought millions of dollars in aid to Africa. (The event was recently featured in this year’s documentary The biggest pop night.)

Video footage of Jones working with Dylan on the song shows a producer with the kind of exhortative enthusiasm you might associate with a favorite Little League coach. “A conductor and an arranger must put an emotional x-ray on the singer and explore his creative psyche,” Jones once said. Indeed, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Peggy Lee are among the many singers from whom he has elicited stunning performances, while racking up 80 Grammy nominations and 28 wins. These awards sit alongside an Emmy for Roots soundtrack, an Oscar for humanitarian work and a Tony for the 2016 revival of The color purpleadding to EGOT status. (Jones co-produced the 1985 film version of The color purplewhich helped place a talk show host named Oprah Winfrey on the national map.)

By his own account, Jones was lucky to survive a difficult childhood on the south side of Chicago, where he was born in 1933. He bore a real scar from that era: “They nailed my hand to a fence with a Switchblade, man,” he said, painting a picture of a black childhood in the era of Al Capone, with tough guys dishing out violence on a daily basis. His father, Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., worked as a carpenter, and his mother, who had attended Boston University and knew several languages, suffered from mental illness requiring institutionalization. In a particularly dark scene from Jones’ youth, recounted in his 2001 memoir, Qhe watched in horror as she devoured her own excrement. Needless to say, there was little emotional connection between them, a void that Jones described as a factor that shaped him as an artist and a human being. For a time, Jones and his younger brother Lloyd were sent to Kentucky to live with their paternal grandmother, a former slave, who occasionally served them fried rats for dinner. Then, at age 11, after moving with his father to the Seattle area, young Quincy discovered the piano. “I had found another mother,” he wrote in his autobiography.

He soon took up the trumpet, the instrument that would eventually be his entry into music, and taught himself the arrangement. At 14, he played in a National Guard band (posing as 18). En route to a concert in Yakima, a car carrying Jones and four of his bandmates collided with a Trailways bus. Only Jones survived. (He later survived two brain aneurysms.) After high school, he went to Boston for a stint at Berklee College of Music, dropped out, and was hired as a trumpeter by vibraphone legend Lionel Hampton, se finding himself playing President Dwight. The inauguration of D. Eisenhower in 1953. He was only 19 years old.

His first full-length album as a bandleader was released four years later. In the midst of this run (and while also writing charts for Count Basie’s big band), Jones pivoted to a day job as an A&R man at Mercury Records. In 1963, he hired a teenage pop singer named Lesley Gore and attached a song to her: “It’s My Party.” This catapulted Jones’ career onto a new commercial plane.

But it was Sinatra, he says, who “took me to a whole new planet.” The two seemed to have an instant and unbreakable bond. “The man was larger than life,” Jones wrote, describing the singer’s musicality as “pure economy, power, style and skill.” Jones would continue to work with Sinatra for decades, producing his final studio album, LA is my ladyin 1984. “I worked with him until he passed away in 1998,” Jones recalled. “He left me his ring. I never take it off.

His creative collaborations with Michael Jackson represented a different kind of stratosphere, with Jones’ production bringing boldness and sparkle to the albums. Out of the wall, ThrillerAnd Bad. Jackson became the pop icon of the 1980s. But Jones’ relationship with Jackson proved more fragile and strained than that with Sinatra. In 2017, he sued Jackson’s production company for $9.4 million in unpaid royalties. (The lawsuit was successful, but the award was later overturned.) Jones also noted that he went through 800 songs in order to find the ones on Thrillerimplying that even an artist as protean as Jackson would be nowhere without good songs and a great producer.

Jones wasn’t shy about throwing out acidic opinions, making him a dream interview for generations of journalists and documentarians. As he approached the age of 90, he decried the state of contemporary music: “It’s not going anywhere at the moment. It’s the sound of champagne being sold. (This, from the co-founder of Atmospherea music magazine he launched with great fanfare in 1993.) He also attacked sacred cows, declaring Paul McCartney “the worst bass player I’ve ever heard.”

The 2018 Netflix documentary, Quincyco-directed by his daughter, Rashida Jones, showed the man in all his garrulous strength, although somewhat paralyzed by the ravages of time and fame. It’s an admiring and elegant portrait, remarkable for its intimacy, that brings to the forefront the man behind so many musical superstars: a place that seems right, given his dynamic charisma and good looks. He was, after all, a noted Casanova, boasting in the film about his appetites even as an octogenarian, looking back on three marriages, including those to a Swedish model-photographer-actress. Ulla Andersson And Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton (mother of Rashida and Kidada), and a partnership with the actress Nastassja Kinski. He was the father of five other children (Jolie, Rachel, Martina, Quincy III, And Kenya), by four other partners, making the extended Jones family something of a modern entertainment dynasty.

The kid from Chicago’s South Side had come a long way, with a multitude of accomplishments, not to mention far-flung encounters with the fabulous, the famous and the historically significant that made him, as he put it, the “Ghetto Gump.” . » (Many of them paid tribute to Jones in 2023 at a 90th birthday party at the Hollywood Bowl.) Twenty-four years earlier, the activist and singer of U2 Bono had invited Jones to an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. At the meeting, Jones was struck by the pontiff’s shoes, which he called “burgundy wingtips.” As he went to kiss the Pope’s hand, the producer blurted out, “Oh, my man wears pimp shoes.” » The pope, he said, “heard me”. It was impossible not to hear Quincy Jones.