It’s been said that everyone knows Quincy JonesThe name even if no one is quite sure what Quincy Jones did. If that truism is true, there are good reasons for it. In a huge, multifaceted career that spanned the music and entertainment industries for eight decades, Jones – who, according to his publicist, “passed away peacefully” last night at age 91 – was pretty much everything, everywhere, everything at the same time. time, and therefore, it is almost impossible to specify. He was a producer, composer, arranger, instrumentalist, businessman, author, mentor, magazine founder, and famous father of famous children. Along the way, Jones may have rarely been center stage, but he imbued a variety of musical genres (jazz, pop, R&B, easy listening) with brilliance and sophistication, all while shaping the creative trajectories of some. of the titans of music. 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 skills in the kitchen. He exerted that same magical touch in the recording studio, mixing surprising ingredients, adding just the right amounts of spice, spiciness and sweetness, and invariably creating a feast for the ears. Put plainly, Jones was among the greatest record producers who ever lived.

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

He created soundtracks for films (Italian work, In the heat of the night) and television (Sanford and son). Produced Jackson’s 1982. Suspensewhich remains the best-selling album of all time and one of a trilogy of records produced by Jones that cemented Jackson’s stardom. Jones had the kind of rare influence in the industry that allowed him, along with the emcee Lionel Richie to bring together people like Jackson, Bruce Springsteen

Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Ray Charles and bob dylanas director and co-producer (with Michael Omartian) from the 1985 All-Star charity single “We are the world.” cultural critic Marcos Greil compared the song to a Pepsi jingle, but it raised millions of dollars in aid for Africa. (The event was recently featured in this year’s documentary. The biggest night of pop.)

The video of Jones working with Dylan on the song shows a producer endowed with the kind of exhortative enthusiasm one might associate with a favorite Little League coach. “A director and an arranger have to take an emotional X-ray of the singer and explore his creative psyche,” Jones once said. In fact, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Peggy Lee are among the many vocalists from whom he garnered impressive performances, while racking up 80 Grammy nominations and 28 wins. Those awards are found next to an Emmy for the Roots soundtrack, an Oscar for humanitarian work and a Tony for the 2016 revival of The color purplejoining the EGOT state. (Jones co-produced the 1985 film version of The color purplewhich helped put a talk show host called Oprah Winfrey on the national map.)

By his own account, Jones was lucky to survive a troubled childhood on Chicago’s South Side, where he was born in 1933. He carried a real scar from those days: “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 wandering thugs doling 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 a mental illness that required hospitalization. In a particularly bleak scene from Jones’ youth, recounted in his 2001 memoir, qHe watched in horror as she devoured her own feces. Needless to say, there was little emotional bond between them, a void that Jones described as a factor that shaped him as an artist and human being. For a time, Jones and his younger brother, Lloyd, were sent to Kentucky to live with their formerly enslaved paternal grandmother, 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,” she wrote in her autobiography.

He soon picked up the trumpet, the instrument that would eventually be his entry into music, and taught himself to make arrangements. At the age of 14 he was already playing in a National Guard band (having pretended to be 18). On the way 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 a pair of brain aneurysms.) After high school, he headed to Boston for a stint at Berklee College of Music, dropped out, was hired as a trumpeter by vibraphone legend Lionel Hampton, and found himself playing in President Dwight. Inauguration of D. Eisenhower in 1953. He was only 19 years old.

His first full-length album as a bandleader came out four years later. In the midst of this career (and while also writing charts for Count Basie’s big band), Jones went on to work as an A&R man at Mercury Records. In 1963, he hired a teenage pop singer named Lesley Gore and accompanied her with a song: “It’s My Party.” It put Jones’ career on a new commercial plane.

But it was Sinatra, he said, 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 musicianship 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 another kind of stratosphere, with Jones’ production bringing sass and polish to the albums. off the wall, Suspenseand Bad. Jackson became the reigning pop icon of the 1980s. But Jones’s relationship with Jackson proved more fragile and strained than the one he had 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 rescinded.) Jones also noted that he had gone through 800 songs to find the ones that were in Suspenseimplying that even an artist as protean as Jackson would be nowhere without great songs and a great producer.

Jones had no qualms about spouting acidic opinions, making it a dream interview for generations of journalists and documentary filmmakers. As he approached 90, he denounced the state of contemporary music: “It’s not going anywhere right now. “It’s champagne sales noise.” (This, from the co-founder of Vibea music magazine he launched to great fanfare in 1993.) He also went after sacred cows, declaring Paul McCartney “Worst bassist I’ve ever heard.”

The 2018 Netflix documentary, quincyco-directed by his daughter, Rashida Jones It showed the man in all his strength and conversation, although somewhat paralyzed by the ravages of time and celebrity. It’s an admirable, elegant portrait, notable for its intimacy, that puts the man behind so many musical superstars front and center—a place that feels right, given his cheerful charisma and good looks. After all, he was a notable Casanova, boasting in the film about his appetites, even as an octogenarian who remembers three marriages, including that of the Swedish model, photographer and actress. Ulla Andersson and mod squad star Peggy Lipton (mother of Rashida and Kidada), and an association with the actress. Nastasja 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 boy from Chicago’s South Side had come a long way, with a number of accomplishments, not to mention the distant 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 U2 singer bond had invited Jones to an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. At the meeting, Jones was impressed by the pontiff’s footwear, which he recalled as “burgundy wingtips.” As he went to kiss the Pope’s hand, the producer blurted out: “Oh, my man has pimp shoes.” The Pope, he said, “heard me.” It was impossible not to listen to Quincy Jones.