Quincy Jones
Based on Wikipedia: Quincy Jones
Frank Sinatra left Quincy Jones his ring. "I never take it off," Jones once said. "Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring." That anecdote tells you something essential about the man who produced Thriller, wrote the theme to Sanford and Son, conducted for Count Basie, and convinced the biggest egos in American music to check themselves at the door long enough to record "We Are the World."
Jones didn't just work in music. He conquered every corner of it.
From the South Side to the World
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on March 14, 1933, on the South Side of Chicago, part of the Great Migration that brought millions of Black Americans from the rural South to northern cities in search of better lives. His father was a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. His paternal grandmother had been born into slavery in Louisville, Kentucky.
The family history runs even stranger than that. Through genealogical research and DNA testing done for a PBS documentary, Jones discovered he was about 34 percent European—with English, French, Italian, and Welsh ancestry threaded through both sides of his family. His mother's male ancestors on the Lanier side had fought for the Confederacy, which technically made him eligible for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his distant relatives was Elizabeth Washington Lewis, a sister of President George Washington.
His mother's side traced back to the Tikar people of Cameroon in West and Central Africa. She sang religious songs constantly, and that was young Quincy's first introduction to music. But his real education came from Lucy Jackson, the neighbor who played stride piano on the other side of their shared wall.
Stride piano, if you've never heard the term, is a jazz style where the left hand "strides" back and forth between bass notes and chords while the right hand plays melody and improvisation. It's athletic, demanding music. The young boy would press his ear against the wall to listen. One day Jackson caught him at her piano, and she later recalled that from that moment on, she couldn't get him off the keys.
Then his mother had a schizophrenic breakdown and was institutionalized.
Jones rarely spoke about this publicly, but it shaped everything. His father divorced his mother and remarried a woman named Elvera who already had three children. They'd have three more together. The blended family moved to Bremerton, Washington, in 1943, where his father took a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. After the war, they relocated to Seattle.
The Seattle Years
At Garfield High School in Seattle, Jones developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger. He fell in with a musical crowd that included Charles Taylor, whose mother Evelyn Bundy was one of Seattle's first society jazz bandleaders. Jones and Taylor started playing gigs together—the Washington Social Club, the Black Elks Club, anywhere in the Pacific Northwest that would have them.
At fourteen years old, Jones was backing Billie Holiday and Billy Eckstine.
Think about that for a moment. A teenager, sharing stages with two of the most celebrated jazz vocalists of the era. Holiday was already a legend, her voice carrying decades of pain and hard-won wisdom. Eckstine was pioneering bebop with his big band, giving early breaks to musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis.
It was in Seattle that Jones met another young musician, a 16-year-old from Florida going by R.C. Robinson. Robinson played bebop piano and alto saxophone and sang like Nat King Cole. He would later change his name to Ray Charles.
Jones credited his father's work ethic with giving him the discipline to succeed. His father had a rhyming motto that Jones carried with him: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all."
Boston, Paris, and the Hampton Tour
Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University in 1951 but transferred after one semester to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Berklee was then a scrappy young institution, not yet the prestigious jazz conservatory it would become. Jones played gigs at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with musicians he later cited as important influences.
In 1953, at twenty years old, he got his big break: a European tour with Lionel Hampton's orchestra.
Hampton was a jazz vibraphone virtuoso and bandleader whose orchestra served as a finishing school for young talent. The tour changed Jones's entire worldview. "It gave you some sense of perspective on past, present, and future," he later explained. "It took the myopic conflict between just black and white in the United States and put it on another level because you saw the turmoil between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Cypriots and the Greeks, and the Swedes and the Danes, and the Koreans and the Japanese. Everybody had these hassles, and you saw it was a basic part of human nature, these conflicts. It opened my soul; it opened my mind."
After leaving Hampton's band in 1954, Jones settled in New York and started writing arrangements "for anyone who would pay." In early 1956, he took a temporary gig at CBS's Stage Show, hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, playing second trumpet in the studio band.
On January 28, 1956, Jones was in that band when a 21-year-old truck driver from Memphis named Elvis Presley made his first national television appearance. Jones played second trumpet for all six of Presley's appearances on the show, including the performance of "Heartbreak Hotel" that would become Presley's first number one record and Billboard's pop record of the year.
Shortly after, Jones became musical director for Dizzy Gillespie and toured the Middle East and South America under sponsorship from the United States Information Agency—the Cold War-era program that sent American artists abroad as cultural ambassadors.
In 1957, Jones moved to Paris, where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. Boulanger, in particular, was one of the most influential music teachers of the twentieth century. Her students included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, and Astor Piazzolla. She took Jones seriously as a composer at a time when American jazz musicians were rarely given that respect.
The Jones Boys and the Music Business Lesson
Jones became music director at Barclay Records in France and continued touring Europe with various jazz orchestras. Eventually, he formed his own big band, The Jones Boys, with eighteen musicians. The band included double bass player Eddie Jones and trumpeter Reunald Jones—neither of whom were related to Quincy.
The concerts met enthusiastic audiences and glowing reviews. They also lost money hand over fist.
"We had the best jazz band on the planet," Jones later recalled, "and yet we were literally starving. That's 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."
Irving Green, head of Mercury Records, bailed Jones out with a personal loan and a job as musical director of the company's New York division. It was a turning point. Jones would never again confuse artistic excellence with commercial viability. He learned to pursue both.
Mercury, Sinatra, and Breaking Barriers
In 1961, Jones was promoted to vice-president of Mercury Records. He was the first African American to hold such a position at a major record label.
This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The music industry, like most American institutions, was deeply segregated. Black artists recorded for Black audiences on labels like Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, while the executive suites remained almost exclusively white. Jones's promotion was genuinely unprecedented.
Two years later, in 1963, he had his first number one record: "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore. Gore was a sixteen-year-old white girl from Tenafly, New Jersey, singing a song about crying at her own birthday party because her boyfriend showed up with another girl. Jones produced it with a driving beat and layered vocals that made the teenage melodrama feel urgent and real.
The song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Jones followed it with a string of hits for Gore: "Judy's Turn to Cry," "She's a Fool," and "You Don't Own Me," which peaked at number two and became an anthem of female independence that has endured for decades.
Meanwhile, Jones was building his relationship with Frank Sinatra.
They'd first worked together in 1958 when Princess Grace of Monaco invited Jones to arrange a benefit concert at the Monaco Sporting Club. Six years later, Sinatra hired him to arrange and conduct It Might as Well Be Swing, Sinatra's second album with Count Basie's orchestra. Jones went on to arrange and conduct Sinatra at the Sands, one of the definitive live albums in popular music, capturing the Chairman of the Board at the peak of his swinging Vegas powers.
Jones also conducted when Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson performed together with the Basie orchestra in 1965 for a benefit that was broadcast to movie theaters nationwide. Nineteen years later, he and Sinatra reunited for the 1984 album L.A. Is My Lady.
"Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring."
The Film Composer
In 1964, at the invitation of director Sidney Lumet, Jones composed the score for The Pawnbroker. It was his first major film score, and it opened the floodgates.
Film scoring was another field where Black composers were virtually absent. The major studios had their staff composers—men like Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman—and the work was passed through established networks that excluded outsiders. Jones broke through by being undeniably excellent and strategically connected.
After The Pawnbroker, Jones left Mercury and moved to Los Angeles. Over the next seven years, he scored nearly forty films, including In the Heat of the Night, the Oscar-winning Sidney Poitier drama about a Black detective in the racist Deep South; In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks's adaptation of Truman Capote's true crime masterpiece; and The Italian Job, the Michael Caine heist comedy with one of the most iconic car chases ever filmed.
He also composed for television. "The Streetbeater," his theme for Sanford and Son, became one of the most recognizable pieces of TV music in America—that funky, strutting bassline that opened every episode of Redd Foxx's sitcom about a junk dealer and his son. Jones wrote themes for Ironside, Banacek, and The Bill Cosby Show. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for his work on the opening episode of Roots, the 1977 miniseries that became a cultural phenomenon.
His 1962 composition "Soul Bossa Nova," from the album Big Band Bossa Nova, found an unexpected second life thirty-five years later as the theme music for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. The swinging, horn-driven track perfectly captured the satirical spy movie's retro aesthetic.
Michael Jackson and the Biggest Album Ever Made
In 1978, Jones produced the soundtrack for The Wiz, an all-Black musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. While working on the film, Jackson asked Jones to recommend some producers for his upcoming solo album.
Jones offered some names. Then he offered to produce it himself.
Jackson was twenty years old, already famous from his childhood with the Jackson 5 but not yet the solo superstar he would become. The resulting album, Off the Wall, sold about twenty million copies worldwide. It established Jackson as an adult artist and Jones as perhaps the most powerful record producer in the industry.
Their next collaboration made history.
Thriller, released in 1982, sold sixty-five million copies. It remains the best-selling album of all time. The success came from multiple factors converging: Jackson's extraordinary talent and work ethic, Jones's sophisticated production, the rise of MTV giving music videos unprecedented promotional power, and a collection of songs that ranged from the rock guitar of "Beat It" to the horror-movie camp of the title track to the sheer pop perfection of "Billie Jean."
Jones understood how to make records that worked on multiple levels. The bass line of "Billie Jean" is one of the most recognizable in pop history—a descending pattern that creates tension and groove simultaneously. The guitar solo on "Beat It," played by Eddie Van Halen as a favor to Jones, bridged rock and pop audiences in a way that seemed impossible at the time. The Vincent Price voiceover on "Thriller" turned a disco song into an event.
Jones and Jackson worked together once more, on 1987's Bad, which sold forty-five million copies. It was their final collaboration. Jackson wanted more creative control; Jones had other projects. They parted professionally, though Jones remained proud of what they'd accomplished together.
"Check Your Ego at the Door"
On January 28, 1985, following the American Music Awards ceremony, Jones gathered most of the major American recording artists of the era into a Los Angeles studio to record "We Are the World."
The song was a charity single to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Jones and his collaborator Michael Jackson had written it with Lionel Richie. The recording session included Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, and dozens more.
Getting that many famous people to collaborate on anything is notoriously difficult. Egos clash. Schedules conflict. Creative visions diverge. Jones approached the problem with characteristic directness. He taped a sign on the studio entrance reading: "Check Your Ego at the Door."
He also mandated casual clothing. "We don't want to make a hunger record in tuxedos," he said.
The song raised over sixty million dollars for humanitarian aid. It demonstrated something Jones had learned across his decades in the industry: that his value wasn't just in his musical skills, but in his ability to bring people together, to create environments where collaboration could flourish.
The Producer as Institution
In 1975, Jones had founded Qwest Productions, which became the vehicle for much of his later work. He produced successful albums for Sinatra and others, and reunited with Lesley Gore for Love Me By Name, a critically acclaimed album that deserved more commercial attention than it received.
His 1981 album The Dude yielded several hits, including "Ai No Corrida" and two songs sung by James Ingram: "Just Once" and "One Hundred Ways." Ingram was one of many artists whose careers Jones launched or elevated.
In 1985, Jones made his debut as a film producer with The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. The film received eleven Oscar nominations, including one for Jones's score. It introduced Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to film audiences worldwide. Jones became one of only a handful of composers—alongside Thomas Newman and Alan Silvestri—to score a Spielberg theatrical feature besides John Williams.
In 1990, Jones's production company partnered with Time Warner to launch Quincy Jones Entertainment. The venture produced The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, giving Will Smith his first acting role and launching a television career that would eventually lead to Hollywood stardom. The company also produced In the House, which ran from 1995 to 1999.
The Honors
By the time of his death on November 3, 2024, at age ninety-one, Jones had accumulated more awards than almost any figure in entertainment history.
He won twenty-eight Grammy Awards from seventy-nine nominations, placing him among the most honored musicians ever. He won a Primetime Emmy for Roots. He received a Tony Award as a producer for the 2016 Broadway revival of The Color Purple. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards, though he never won a competitive Oscar.
The honorary awards piled up: the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011. France made him a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014. Just months before his death, in June 2024, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary Oscar.
Time magazine named him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the twentieth century.
The Lesson
What made Jones different from other extraordinarily talented musicians?
Partly it was range. He moved from jazz trumpet to big band arranging to pop production to film scoring to television themes to Broadway producing, mastering each discipline and bringing insights from one field to another. The man who studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris was the same man who produced "It's My Party" and "Thriller" and the theme to Sanford and Son.
Partly it was longevity. A seven-decade career meant he could work with Count Basie in the 1960s and Will Smith in the 1990s, connecting generations of American entertainment.
But mostly it was the lesson he learned when his big band went broke in Europe: that there's music, and there's the music business, and if you want to survive—if you want to thrive—you have to master both.
Jones never stopped being an artist. But he also never forgot that art exists in a commercial context, that bringing people together requires institutional power as well as creative vision, that checking your ego at the door sometimes matters more than individual brilliance.
He kept Sinatra's ring on his finger until the end. When he went to Sicily, he didn't need a passport.
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