The 1994 movie Forrest Gump starred Tom Hanks as a man who randomly encounters legendary figures from 20th-century history: Elvis, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon and Richard Nixon. Quincy Jones, who has died at the age of 91, liked to refer to himself as the “ghetto Gump”. It’s easy to see why.
Over a seven-decade career, Jones enjoyed stellar success as a record producer, film composer and entertainment mogul. Along the way, he rubbed shoulders with, among others, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk.
The ghetto bit was only kind-of true. Jones was born in Chicago in 1933 to working-class parents. After his mother, who had schizophrenia, was institutionalised, he was sent to Kentucky for a while to live with his grandmother, who sent him down to the local river to catch rats for her to kill and cook.
Moving to Seattle with his father, having survived a car crash in which the other four people in the vehicle died, Jones got hooked on music and became a trumpeter. Friends with another local schoolboy, Ray Charles, at 18 he joined Lionel Hampton’s jazz band and toured the US.
Jones’s next move was to New York, where he worked as a musical arranger for Count Basie and others. He travelled the world with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, then lived in France, where he regularly dined with Picasso, a neighbour. In 1958, Grace Kelly asked him to conduct and arrange for Frank Sinatra at a charity concert in Monaco.
This launched a relationship with the singer during which Jones produced many of his greatest works, including the acclaimed 1966 album Sinatra at the Sands. Back in the US in the early 1960s, he also worked with Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Sammy Davis Jr, proving himself a dexterous producer able to work with sometimes monstrous egos.
Joining Mercury Records, Jones soon rose to vice-president. He could see that jazz was in retreat and pop was on the rise, and produced several million-selling singles for teenage starlet Leslie Gore, including her 1963 US number one “It’s My Party”.
But he craved work in the movies. Moving to Los Angeles, he scored dozens of films, including In The Heat of the Night (1967) and The Italian Job (1969) and wrote music for TV shows, including the theme from Ironside, and won an Emmy for his work on Roots.
Surviving a 1974 brain aneurysm that forced him to give up his beloved trumpet, Jones embraced soul and funk, producing hit albums for Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and George Benson. He also found time to make his own music, enjoying US top 10 albums with Body Heat and The Dude.
Yet Jones will, for many people, forever be associated with the 1980s, and in particular his collaborations with Michael Jackson. Having worked with Jackson on the 1978 movie The Wiz, Jones became the superstar’s studio producer and helmed his three career-defining albums.
Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987) have, in total, sold more than 100mn copies. Thriller spent 37 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and remains the best-selling album of all time (and, in the streaming era, will probably remain so). Jones also found time to produce the multi-artist 1985 charity single “We Are the World” to raise funds to help fight famine in Ethiopia.
He had a laser eye for talent. In 1985, he plucked Oprah Winfrey from local TV in Chicago to star in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), which Jones also co-produced and scored. Five years later, he linked with Time Warner to form Quincy Jones Entertainment, which created hit TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and launched the career of Will Smith.
Jones’ personal life was as busy as his career. He married, and divorced, three times, and is survived by seven children, including the actress Rashida Jones.
In more recent times, he was a neighbour of Elon Musk, and claimed to have frequently enjoyed dinner with him, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos.
Fittingly for the Ghetto Gump, tributes have been paid by Paul McCartney (“He had a twinkle in his eye”), Michael Caine, Elton John and two US presidents, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Stevie Wonder told Rolling Stone: “Quincy should be remembered as one of God’s greatest gifts to the world.”
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