US music titan Quincy Jones who produced Michael Jacksons Thriller album and collaborated with artists including Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles has died aged 91.
His publicist Arnold Robinson said he passed away last night surrounded by his family at his home in the Bel Air area of Los Angeles. No cause of death was given.
Joness family - which includes his actress daughter Rashida Jones, who played Karen Filippelli in The Office - said in a statement: Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones passing.
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.
Along with Rashida, Jones - known to friends as Q - is survived by 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.
Joness final Instagram post yesterday wished his daughter Martina Tina a happy birthday, and featured a photograph of the two smiling together. It said: Happy Birthday to my Tina Beena! So proud to be yo papa! Big hug, I love you eternally.
Quincy Joness final Instagram post yesterday wished his daughter Tina a happy birthday
Quincy Jones at the 1994 Grammy awards with Michael Jackson
Quincy Jones with his Hollywood actress daughter Rashida Jones, who played Karen Filippelli in The Office. They are pictured at a pre-Grammys event in Beverly Hills in January 2020
Jones rose to the top of showbusiness as he became one of the first black executives to thrive in Hollywood and amassed an extraordinary musical catalogue.
He toured with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, arranged records for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and composed soundtracks for Roots and In The Heat Of The Night.
Jones organised then-president Bill Clintons first inaugural celebration and oversaw the all-star recording of We Are The World in 1985 for famine relief in Africa.
Lionel Richie, who co-wrote We Are the World and was among the featured singers on the charity record, would call Jones the master orchestrator.
He will likely be best remembered for his productions with Jackson, with his versatility and imagination helping set off the singers talents as he transformed from child star to the King of Pop.
Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones at the We Are The World 25 Years for Haiti recording session held at Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood in February 2010
President Barack Obama presents a National Medal of Arts to Quincy Jones at the White House in March 2011
On such classic tracks as Billie Jean and Dont Stop Til You Get Enough, Jones and Jackson fashioned a global soundscape out of disco, funk, rock, pop, R&B and 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-fusing Beat It and brought in Vincent Price for a ghoulish voiceover on the title track.
Thriller sold more than 20 million copies in 1983 alone and has contended with the Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-1975 among others as the best-selling album of all time.
If an album doesnt do well, everyone says it was the producers fault; so if it does well, it should be your fault too, Jones said in an interview with the Library of Congress in 2016.
The tracks dont just all of a sudden appear. The producer has to have the skill, experience and ability to guide the vision to completion.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Jones would cite the hymns his mother sang around the house as the first music he could remember.
But he looked back sadly on his childhood, once telling Oprah Winfrey that there are two kinds of people: those who have nurturing parents or caretakers, and those who dont. Nothings in between.
Joness mother suffered from emotional problems and eventually went into a mental health institution, a loss that made the world seem senseless for Jones.
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 Associated Press in 2018, showing a scar from his childhood.
However, he was saved by music. As a boy, he learned that a neighbour owned a piano and he soon played it constantly himself.
His father moved to Washington state when Jones was ten and his world changed at a neighbourhood recreation centre.
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. On the stage was a piano.
I went up there, paused, stared, and then tinkled on it for a moment, he wrote in his autobiography. Thats where I began to find peace. I was 11. I knew this was it for me. Forever.
Within a few years he was playing trumpet and befriending Charles, who became a lifelong friend.
He was gifted enough to win a scholarship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out when Hampton invited him to tour with his band.
Jones went on to work as a freelance composer, conductor, arranger and producer. As a teen, he backed Billie Holiday. By his mid-20s, he was touring with his own band.
Quincy Jones in Los Angeles in October 2018
We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving, Jones later told Musician magazine.
Thats when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.
Jones also revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that he became hooked on heroin for five months aged just 15.
After playing at the clubs with Charles, they would go play for free at bebop jam sessions.
He recalled: The guys, when they finished playing, theyd go in the corner and they had it on their thumb. Ray wouldnt let me get in the corner...[but I] would sneak into the line and get a little hit.
Sir Elton John and Quincy Jones at the singers Aids Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party in West Hollywood in February 2019
Charles would struggle with heroin addiction for more than a decade, but Jones got out early and credits this to when he fell down five flights of stairs when he was high.
The mistakes are what help you grow and learn, he said. That was a big one. If I hadnt done that, I wouldve been a junkie forever. Thank God we did it there and got it over with.
As a music executive, Jones overcame racial barriers by becoming a vice president at Mercury Records in the early 60s.
In 1971, he became the first black musical director for the Academy Awards ceremony.
The first movie he produced, The Color Purple, received 11 Oscar nominations in 1986 - but, to his great disappointment, no wins.
Quincy Jones and Naomi Campbell at the American Icon Awards Gala in Los Angeles in May 2019
In a partnership with Time Warner, he created Quincy Jones Entertainment, which included the pop-culture magazine Vibe and Qwest Broadcasting. The company was sold for $270million (£208million) in 1999.
My philosophy as a businessman has always come from the same roots as my personal credo: take talented people on their own terms and treat them fairly and with respect, no matter who they are or where they come from, Jones wrote in his autobiography.
He was at ease with virtually every form of American music, whether setting Sinatras Fly Me to the Moon to a punchy, swinging rhythm and wistful flute or opening his production of Charles soulful In the Heat of the Night with a lusty tenor sax solo.
He worked with jazz giants including Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, rappers including Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J, crooners such as Sinatra and Tony Bennett, pop singers including Lesley Gore, rhythm and blues stars such as Chaka Khan, and rapper and singer Queen Latifah.
Quincy Jones at the 33rd Grammy Awards in New York in February 1991
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 - P.Y.T (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 sitcom Sanford and Son.
Jones was also a facilitator and maker of the stars. He gave Will Smith a key break in the hit TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which Jones produced, and through The Color Purple he introduced Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg to filmgoers.
Starting in the 1960s, he composed more than 35 film scores, including for The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night and In Cold Blood.
Quincy Jones at Singers and Songs Celebrate Tony Bennetts 80th in Hollywood in 2006
He called scoring a multifaceted process, an abstract combination of science and soul.
Jones work on the soundtrack for The Wiz led to his partnership with Jackson, who starred in the 1978 movie.
In an essay published in Time magazine after Jacksons death, in 2009, Jones remembered that the singer kept slips of paper on him that contained thoughts by famous thinkers.
When Jones asked about the origins of one passage, Jackson answered Socrates, but pronounced it SO-crayts. Jones corrected him, Michael, its SOCK-ra-tees.
Quincy Jones directs the Orchestra National de France in Paris in July 2000
And the look he gave me then, it just prompted me to say, because Id been impressed by all the things I saw in him during the rehearsal process, `I would love to take a shot at producing your album, Jones recalled.
And he went back and told the people at Epic Records, and they said, `No way - Quincys too jazzy. Michael was persistent, and he and his managers went back and said, `Quincys producing the album. And we proceeded to make `Off the Wall.
Ironically, that was one of the biggest black-selling albums at the time, and that album saved all the jobs of the people saying I was the wrong guy. Thats the way it works.
Jones was hooked on work and play, and at times suffered for it. He nearly died from a brain aneurysm in 1974 and became deeply depressed in the 1980s after The Color Purple was snubbed by Academy Awards voters. He never received a competitive Oscar.
Quincy Jones works with Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg on the ET soundtrack in 1982
A father of seven children by five mothers, Jones described himself as a dog who had countless lovers around the world.
To me, loving a woman is one of the most natural, blissful, life-enhancing - and dare I say, religious - acts in the world, he wrote.
He was not an activist in his early years, but changed after attending the 1968 funeral of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and later befriending the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Jones was dedicated to philanthropy, saying the best and only useful aspect of fame and celebrity is having a platform to help others.
His causes included fighting HIV and AIDS, educating children and providing for the poor around the world.
Quincy Jones and Eddie Murphy at San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood in October 2019
He founded the 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, the Spanish poet and philosopher Federico Garcia Lorca said, Jones wrote in his memoir. Mines been in Technicolor, with full Dolby sound through THX amplification before they knew what these systems were.
Jones was married three times, with his third wife Peggy Lipton dying in May 2019 aged 72 following a battle with cancer.
At the time, Jones said: There is absolutely no combination of words that can express the sadness I feel after losing my beloved Peggy Lipton…. My wife of 14 years.
We shared many, many beautiful memories, and most importantly, we share two incredible daughters… Pie (Kidada) & Doonkie (Rashida).
Michael Jackson with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in February 1984
Regardless of the paths that our lives took us on, I can say with the utmost certainty, that love is eternal. Thank you all for the love and support youve shown me and my family.
In May 2020, Jones had £5million taken away from him after a decision to grant him £7.5million ($9.4million) in royalties and fees from Jacksons estate went to a Californian appeal court.
Jones was awarded around £7.5million in 2017 for use of songs produced by Jones that were used in Jacksons concert film This Is It and two Cirque du Soleil shows.
But Californias 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that the jury misinterpreted a contract that was the judges job to interpret.
It took away around £5.5million ($6.9million) that jurors had said MJJ Productions owed Jones for his work on Billie Jean, Thriller, and more of Jacksons biggest hits.
Quincy Jones and his wife Peggy Lipton hold Joness star which was placed in the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles in March 1980
That came two years after Jacksons father Joe Jackson hit back at Jones after the producer gave a controversial interview in which he accused the King of Pop of stealing some of his greatest music.
In February 2018, Jackson called Jones jealous and dismissed any claims that his son was anything but the number one artist in the world.
Speaking to Page Six, Jackson said Jones was quite jealous of Michael because hes never worked with someone with all of that talent.
It came after Jones told Vulture: Michael stole a lot of stuff. He stole a lot of songs. [Donna Summers] State of Independence and Billie Jean. The notes dont lie, man. He was as Machiavellian as they come . . . Greedy, man. Greedy.
In June last year, Jones was taken to hospital after a medical emergency at his Los Angles home following a bad reaction to some food. But doctors later gave Jones the all-clear, and he was released.
Quincy Jones with his daughters Rashida (left) and Kidada at the 68th Academy Awards in Los Angeles in March 1996
The list of his honours and awards fills 18 pages in his 2001 autobiography Q, including 27 Grammys at the time (now 28), an honorary Academy Award (now two) and an Emmy for Roots.
Jones also received Frances Legion dHonneur, the Rudolph Valentino Award from the Republic of Italy and a Kennedy Center tribute 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 daughter Rashida Jones. His memoir made him a best-selling author.
You name it, Quincys done it. Hes been able to take this genius of his and translate it into any kind of sound that he chooses, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock told PBS in 2001.
He is fearless. If you want Quincy to do something, you tell him that he cant do it. And of course he will - hell do it.
How trumpeter, bandleader and producer Quincy Jones became one of American musics biggest influences of all time
By Bill Trott
Quincy Jones, the man known simply as Q, was a huge influence on American music in his work with artists ranging from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra and reshaped pop music in his collaborations Michael Jackson.
There was very little Jones did not do in a music career of more than 65 years. He was a trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, composer, producer and winner of 27 Grammy Awards.
A studio workaholic and a virtuoso at handling delicate egos, he shaped recordings by jazz greats such as Miles Davis, produced Sinatra, and put together the superstar ensemble that recorded the 1985 fund-raiser We Are the World, the biggest hit song of its time.
Jones also was a prolific writer of movie scores and co-produced the film The Color Purple, as well as the 1990s television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which launched the career of Will Smith.
Jones circle of friends included some of the best known figures of the 20th century. He dined with Pablo Picasso, met Pope John Paul II, helped Nelson Mandela celebrate his 90th birthday and once retreated to Marlon Brandos South Pacific island to recover from a breakdown.
Quincy Jones poses amongst his many Grammy awards at his home in the Bel Air area of Los Angeles in April 2004
Everything he did was stamped with his universal and undeniable hipness. U2 frontman Bono called Jones the coolest person Ive ever met.
Jones most lasting achievements were in collaboration with Jackson. They made three landmark albums - Off the Wall in 1979, Thriller in 1982, and Bad in 1987 - that changed the landscape of American popular music. Thriller sold as many as 70 million copies, with six of the nine songs on the album becoming top 10 singles.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born March 14, 1933, in Chicago. As a boy, he aspired to be a gangster like those he saw in his rough neighbourhood. He was seven when his mother was taken to a mental health institution.
His father, a carpenter, remarried and moved the family to Bremerton in Washington state, where young Quincy pursued a life of petty crime.
Jones said his interest in music bloomed in Bremerton, when he and some friends found a piano after sneaking into the community centre in the segregated wartime housing project where they lived.
He experimented with different instruments in the school band before settling on the trumpet and by 13 was playing jazz, popular music and rhythm-and-blues in nightclubs.
In Seattle at age 14, Jones met 16-year-old Ray Charles, not yet famous, who taught him to arrange and compose music.
Basie and trumpeter Clark Terry also would be mentors to the young Jones and he won a scholarship to what would become the Berklee School of Music in Boston.
He gave it up, however, to go on the road with Lionel Hamptons band as a teenage trumpet player in the early 1950s.
Music was the one thing I could control, Jones wrote in his autobiography. It was the one world that offered me freedom ... I didnt have to search for answers. The answers lay no further than the bell of my trumpet and my scrawled, pencilled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant and cool.
In the late 1950s he went on US government-sponsored tours around the world with a band organized by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie.
Quincy Jones poses for a portrait to promote his documentary Quincy during the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018
Jones then led his own band through Europe. He was deeply in debt in the early 1960s when he took a job at Mercury Records in New York, becoming one of the first Black executives at a white-owned record company.
There, Jones ventured out of the jazz genre and produced his first hit single, Its My Party, a Lesley Gore song that topped the U.S. pop chart in 1964.
Jazz purists called him a sell-out for making pop music but Jones later told Rolling Stone: The underlying motivation for any artist, be it Stravinsky or Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music they want and still have everyone buy it.
At Mercury, Jones got his first movie-scoring job, Sidney Lumets The Pawnbroker. He went on to score nearly 40 films, including In the Heat of the Night, In Cold Blood, Mackennas Gold, The Wiz and part of the television mini-series Roots.
The people Jones worked with would populate a jazz or R&B hall of fame - Basie, Gillespie, Tommy Dorsey, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin.
But he also produced in other genres with, among others, Paul Simon, Amy Winehouse, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer.
He arranged Sinatras hit Fly Me to the Moon that astronaut Buzz Aldrin played a cassette recording of during the first moon landing in 1969.
Years later, Jones told GQ magazine that Sinatra called me up, and he was like a little kid: We got the first music on the moon, man!
His own recordings were just as eclectic, veering from jazz to soul, African to Brazilian. In 1991 his Back on the Block record won the Grammy for album of the year and also Grammys in the rap, rhythm and blues, jazz fusion and instrumental categories.
Jones work with Jackson was historic, although Jacksons record company initially thought Jones was too jazzy to be his producer.
They started in 1979 with Off the Wall, after the singer had split from his brothers in the Jackson 5 and put together a mix of dance tracks and ballads. The album featured four songs that became top 10 hits.
Their 1982 collaboration, Thriller, became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s. Jones and Jackson wanted to broaden Jacksons fan base so they added rock elements, getting guitarist Eddie Van Halen to play a blistering solo on Beat It, which became one of Jackons biggest hits ever.
Quincy Jones relaxes at his Los Angeles music studio in October 1974
Complemented by dazzling videos featuring Jacksons mesmerising dancing just as MTV was coming of age, Thriller made the entertainer one of the biggest stars in the world.
Hits like Beat It, Billie Jean and the title song made Thriller the biggest selling album of all time. It won three Grammys for Jones and seven for Jackson.
They followed that in 1987 with Bad, which had five No. 1 hits, including Smooth Criminal and Man in the Mirror.
In 1985, Jones, Jackson and singer Lionel Richie organized We Are the World, a record to raise money for fighting famine in Ethiopia.
The huge all-star chorus featured Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen and Smokey Robinson. Jones set the tone for the recording session with a sign that said: Leave your ego at the door.
Jackson died in 2009, and Jones later sued the estate, testifying that he was cheated out of a lot of money in royalties.
Jones started his own record label, Qwest, as well as Vibe, a magazine that covered the hip-hop world, and had various foundations and humanitarian projects.
He kept launching new projects well past the traditional retirement age. In 2018, Jones, then 84, told GQ magazine: I never been this busy in my life.
Jones was married three times. His first wife was his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell with whom he had one daughter; his second wife was Swedish model Ulla Andersson with whom he had two children, including Quincy III, who became a hip-hop producer.
His third wife was Mod Squad actress Peggy Lipton, with whom he had two daughters, including actress Rashida Jones. He had two other children outside his marriages, including one with actress Nastassja Kinski.