Quincy Jones, the musical giant who did it all as a record producer, film composer, multi-genre artist, entertainment executive and humanitarian, has died. He was 91.
Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, told the Associated Press that he died Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.
“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the family said in a statement to AP. “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 received the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, an honorary Oscar in 2024 and the Grammy Legend Award in 1991 and reeled in 28 Grammys from an all-time best 80 nominations.
Survivors include one of his seven children, actress Rashida Jones.
In a phenomenal career that spanned more than 60 years, Jones produced Michael Jackson’s best-selling albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad; obtained the rights to the novel The Color Purple, cast a young Oprah Winfrey in the Steven Spielberg 1985 film adaptation and received three Oscar nominations for his work; helmed the historic recording sessions for the 1985 charity single “We Are the World,” the best-selling single of all time; and produced Lesley Gore’s 1963 chart-topping hit “It’s My Party.”
The first U.S. feature that Jones scored was Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), and he did the music for two landmark films released in 1967: the best picture Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night and Truman Copote’s In Cold Blood.
He described his first visit to Hollywood to THR‘s Seth Abramovitch in May 2021.
“I was dressed in my favorite suit, and the producer came out to meet me at Universal,” he said. “He stopped in his tracks — total shock — and he went back and told [music supervisor] Joe Gershenson, ‘You didn’t tell me Quincy Jones was a Negro.’ They didn’t use Black composers in films. They only used three-syllable Eastern European names, Bronislaw Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin. It was very, very racist.”
For television, Jones composed the theme songs for such series as the 1969-71 Bill Cosby Show, Ironside and Sanford and Son and executive produced such series as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he discovered Will Smith, and In the House, starring LL Cool J.
He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, and the next year he produced the documentary Keep on Keepin’ On, about jazz legend Clark Terry and his mentorship of a blind piano prodigy.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933, to parents Quincy Delight Jones Sr. and Sarah Frances Jones. His mother worked in a bank before being admitted to a mental institution for schizophrenia when Quincy was 7; his father was a carpenter who played semi-pro baseball. He was raised with his only full-blood brother, Lloyd.
Quincy Sr. divorced Sarah shortly after she was institutionalized and remarried a woman named Elvera, who had three children. They then had three more of their own for an eight-sibling family.
His father in 1943 uprooted the family to Bremerton, Washington, where he accepted a new job. They later moved to Seattle, where Quincy Jr. attended Garfield High School and ignited his passion for the arts by studying music composition and learning to play the trumpet. That kept him out of trouble.
When just a teenager, Jones met a 16-year-old Ray Charles — a meeting captured in the 2004 Jamie Foxx film Ray — who became a huge inspiration, teacher and friend, and they would work together on several musical projects.
Jones attended Seattle University, studied music and played in the college band — Clint Eastwood also was a student at the time — but completed just one semester before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship. He left college to tour with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger for some of the era’s leading talents, including Charles, Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa. His first Grammy win was for the song arrangement on Count Basie’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
