Quincy Jones, the talented music titan whose vast legacy spanned from producing Michael Jackson’s landmark “Thriller” album to writing award-winning film and television soundtracks to collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, has died. 91 years old. .

Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, says he died Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family. Jones was to receive an honorary Academy Award later this month.

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

Jones rose from working with gangs on Chicago’s South Side to the very heights of show business, becoming one of the first black executives to prosper in Hollywood and amassing an extraordinary musical catalog that includes some of the richest moments in rhythm and the American song. For years, you were unlikely to find a music lover who didn’t own at least one record to his name, or a leader in the entertainment industry and beyond who didn’t have some connection to him.

Jones was in the company of presidents and foreign leaders, movie stars and musicians, philanthropists and business leaders. He toured with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, arranged records for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, composed the soundtracks for “Roots” and “In the Heat of the Night,” organized President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural celebration and oversaw the all-star recording of “We Are the World”, the 1985 charity album to alleviate hunger in Africa.

Lionel Richie, co-writer of “We Are the World” and one of the featured singers, would call Jones “the master orchestrator.”

In a career that began when records were still played on platters spinning at 78 rpm, top honors probably go to his productions with Jackson: “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” were albums nearly universal in their style. and attractive. .

Jones’ versatility and imagination helped unleash Jackson’s explosive talents as he transformed from child star to “King of Pop.” On classic songs like “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” Jones and Jackson created a global soundscape of disco, funk, rock, pop, R&B, jazz and African chants.

For “Thriller,” some of the most memorable touches originated with Jones, who recruited Eddie Van Halen for a guitar solo on the genre-blending “Beat It” and brought in Vincent Price for a macabre voiceover on the main song.

“Thriller” sold more than 20 million copies in 1983 alone and has competed with the Eagles’ “Greatest Hits 1971-1975,” among others, as the best-selling album of all time.

“If an album doesn’t turn out well, everyone says ‘it was the producer’s fault’; so if he does well, it should be your ‘fault’ too,” Jones said in an interview with the Library of Congress in 2016. “Tracks don’t just appear. The producer must have the skill, experience and ability to guide the vision to completion.”

The list of his honors and awards fills 18 pages in his 2001 autobiography “Q,” including 27 Grammy Awards at the time (now 28), an honorary Academy Award (now two) and an Emmy for “Roots.” He also received the Legion of Honor from France, the Rudolph Valentino Prize from the Republic of Italy, and a Kennedy Center Honor for his contributions to American culture. He was the subject of a 1990 documentary, “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones” and a 2018 film by his daughter Rashida Jones. His memoirs made him a best-selling author.

Born in Chicago in 1933, Jones would cite the hymns his mother sang at home as the first music he remembered. But he looked back sadly on his childhood and once told Oprah Winfrey that “there are two types of people: those who have loving parents or caregivers and those who don’t. There is nothing in between.” Jones’ mother suffered emotional problems and was eventually institutionalized, a loss that made the world seem “meaningless” to Quincy. He spent much of his time in Chicago on the streets, with gangs, stealing and fighting.

“They nailed my hand to a fence with a switchblade, man,” he told the AP in 2018, showing a scar from his childhood.

Music saved him. As a child, he learned that a neighbor in Chicago had a piano and soon he was constantly playing it himself. His father moved to Washington state when Quincy was 10 and his world changed at a neighborhood recreation center. Jones and some friends had broken into the kitchen and helped themselves to lemon meringue pie when Jones noticed a small room nearby with a stage. There was a piano on stage.

“I went up there, stopped, looked, and then jingled for a moment,” he wrote in his autobiography. “That’s where I started to find peace. I was 11 years old. I knew this was it for me. Forever.”

Within a few years he was already playing the trumpet and became friends with a young blind musician named Ray Charles, with whom he became a lifelong friend. He was talented enough to earn a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, but abandoned his studies when Hampton invited him to tour with his band. Jones went on to work as an independent composer, director, arranger and producer. As a teenager, he endorsed Billie Holiday. When he was in his twenties, he was touring with his own band.

“We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving,” Jones later told Musician magazine. “That’s when I discovered that music existed and that the music business existed. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”

As a music executive, he overcame racial barriers by becoming vice president of Mercury Records in the early 1960s. In 1971, he became the first black musical director of the Academy Awards ceremony. The first film he produced, “The Color Purple,” received 11 Oscar nominations in 1986 (but, much to his disappointment, won no awards). In partnership with Time Warner, he created Quincy Jones Entertainment, which included the pop culture magazine Vibe and Qwest Broadcasting. The company was sold for $270 million in 1999.

“My philosophy as a businessman has always had the same roots as my personal credo: take talented people on their own terms and treat them fairly and respectfully, no matter who they are or where they come from,” Jones wrote in his autobiography. . .

He was comfortable with virtually all forms of American music, whether setting Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” with a driving, swinging rhythm and melancholic flute or opening his production of Sinatra’s soulful “In the Heat of the Night.” Charles with a vigorous tenor sax solo. He worked with jazz giants (Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington), rappers (Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J), singers (Sinatra, Tony Bennett), pop singers (Lesley Gore) and rhythm and blues stars (Chaka Khan, Queen Latifah ).

On “We are the World” alone, performers included Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen. He co-wrote hits for Jackson – “PYT (Pretty Young Thing” – and Donna Summer – “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger) – and had songs sampled by Tupac Shakur, Kanye West and other rappers. He even composed the theme song for the comedy “Sanford and Son.”

Jones was a star facilitator and creator. He gave Will Smith a key opportunity on the hit TV show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which Jones produced, and through “The Color Purple” introduced Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg to moviegoers. Beginning in the 1960s, he composed more than 35 film scores, including “The Pawnbroker,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “In Cold Blood.”

He called scoring “a multifaceted process, an abstract combination of science and soul.”

Jones’ work on the soundtrack for “The Wiz” led him to team up with Jackson, who starred in the 1978 film. In an essay published in Time magazine after Jackson’s death in 2009, Jones recalled that the singer kept little papers containing thoughts of famous thinkers. When Jones asked about the origins of a passage, Jackson answered “Socrates,” but pronounced it “SO-crayts.” Jones corrected him: “Michael, they’re SOCK-ra-tees.”

“And the look he gave me then prompted me to say, because I was impressed by all the things I saw in him during the rehearsal process, ‘I’d love to try to produce your album.’” Jones recalled. “And he went back and told the people at Epic Records, and they said, ‘No way, Quincy is too jazzy.’ Michael was persistent and he and his managers came back and said, “Quincy is producing the album.” And we proceeded to do ‘Off the Wall’. Ironically, that was one of the biggest-selling albums by black people at the time, and that album saved all the jobs of the people who said I was the wrong guy. “That’s how it works.”

Tensions arose after Jackson’s death. In 2013, Jones sued Jackson’s estate, alleging that he was owed millions in royalties and production fees for some of the superstar’s biggest hits. In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, he called Jackson “as Machiavellian as they come” and alleged that he stole material from others.

Jones was hooked on work and play and sometimes suffered for it. He nearly died of a brain aneurysm in 1974 and became deeply depressed in the 1980s after Academy Awards voters rejected “The Color Purple”; he never received a competitive Oscar. Jones, a father of seven children from five mothers, described himself as a “dog” who had countless lovers around the world. He was married three times and among his wives was the actress Peggy Lipton.

“For me, loving a woman is one of the most natural, joyful, life-enriching and, dare I say, religious acts in the world,” he wrote.

Along with Rashida, Jones is survived by her daughters Jolie Jones Levine, Rachel Jones, Martina Jones, Kidada Jones and Kenya Kinski-Jones; son Quincy Jones III; brother Richard Jones and sisters Theresa Frank and Margie Jay.

He was not an activist in his early years, but changed after attending the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in 1968 and later becoming friends with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Jones was dedicated to philanthropy and said that “the best and only useful aspect of fame and celebrity is having a platform to help others.”

Its causes included fighting HIV and AIDS, educating children, and helping the poor around the world. He founded Quincy Jones Listen Up! Foundation to connect young people with music, culture and technology, and said he was driven throughout his life by “a spirit of adventure and a criminal level of optimism.”

“Life is like a dream, said the Spanish poet and philosopher Federico García Lorca,” Jones wrote in his memoirs. “Mine was in Technicolor, with full Dolby sound through THX amplification before they knew what these systems were.”

— The Associated Press