Quincy Jones (Quincy Delight Jones, Jr.), 1933-, African-American musician, composer, bandleader, and music executive, b. Chicago. Jones played trumpet and sang gospel growing up, and studied briefly at Boston's Berklee College of Music (then called Schillinger House). After 1951 he played with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie and was also an arranger for such jazz greats as Duke Ellington , Tommy Dorsey , Count Basie , and his childhood friend Ray Charles . Jones traveled to Paris in 1957, where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen , became music director for Mercury Records' French division, and briefly (1960-61) led a big band.

Returning to New York in the early 1960s, Jones became a vice president at Mercury, breaking the executive color barrier there. He also began to compose for films and television, including scores for The Pawnbroker (1965), In Cold Blood (1967), and The Wiz (1978). He coproduced the film The Color Purple (1985) and was responsible for several TV sitcoms. From 1979 to 1987 he produced Michael Jackson 's chartbuster albums, catapulting the singer to superstardom. Jones also founded (1980) a record company, established (1990) Vibe magazine, and formed (1991) Qwest Broacasting.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (2001).

Quincy Jones

Born: March 14, 1933
Chicago, Illinois
African American musician, composer, producer, arranger, and film and television executive

Quincy Jones has worked as a musician, composer, arranger, producer, and film and television executive. He also helped Michael Jackson (1958–), Oprah Winfrey (1954–), and many others become stars.

Early life

Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 14, 1933. His parents divorced soon after his younger brother, Lloyd, was born, and the Jones boys were raised by their father, a carpenter, and his new wife. She had three children of her own and three more with Quincy Jones, Sr. His birth mother, Sarah Jones, was in and out of mental hospitals, and it was not until his adult life that Quincy was able to enjoy a close relationship with her. When Jones was ten years old his family moved to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, Washington. He began taking trumpet lessons at school, and three years later he met a fifteen-year-old musician named Ray Charles (1932–). The two formed a band and played in local clubs and weddings, and soon Jones was composing and arranging music for the group.

Music career

After high school and a scholarship at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Jones was introduced to the life of a musician on the road. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993) in 1956 and Lionel Hampton (1909–2002) in 1957, and then he made his base in Paris, France. He studied with composer Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), wrote for Harry Arnold's Swedish All-Stars in Stockholm, Sweden, and directed the music for Harold Arlen's production Free and Easy, which toured Europe for three months, ending in early 1960.

After an unsuccessful tour of the United States with a band made up of eighteen musicians from Free and Easy, Jones worked as musical director at Mercury Records in New York. He became the first African American executive in a white-owned record company in 1964 when he was promoted to vice president at Mercury. He produced albums, sat in on recording sessions, and wrote arrangements for artists at Mercury as well as other labels. Jones wrote for Andy Williams (1928–), Peggy Lee (1920–2002), and Aretha Franklin (1942–), as well as arranging and conducting It Might As Well Be Swing, an album featuring Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) and the Count Basie (1904–1984) Band.

Film and television music

Jones's first venture into Hollywood came when he composed the score (the music that accompanies a movie) for the 1965 film The Pawnbroker. Jones won an Academy Award for his score for In Cold Blood (1967) and went on to write the music for over fifty films. In 1969 Jones signed a contract as a recording artist with A&M Records, and his first album with that label, Walking in Space, won a Grammy for best jazz instrumental (without vocals) album of 1969.

Television has also featured Jones's music, starting in 1971 with musical scores and theme songs for such shows as Ironside and Sanford and Son. In 1973 Jones co-produced "Duke Ellington, We Love You Madly," a special for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), featuring a forty-eight-piece orchestra conducted by Jones. The special was a project of the Institute for Black American Music, a foundation formed by Jones and other musicians with the goal of increasing awareness of the African American contribution to American music and Duke Ellington (1899–1974) in particular. Jones also wrote the score for the successful 1977 television mini-series Roots.

Recording and producing

Burned out from producing film sound-tracks, Jones stopped working for Hollywood in 1973 to explore his own music career as a vocalist. His singing debut was with Valerie Simpson on an album called You've Got It Bad, Girl. The title song from the album stayed at the top of the charts for most of the summer of 1973. Jones's next album, 1974's Body Heat, was an even bigger hit. Containing the hit songs "Everything Must Change" and "If I Ever Lose This Heaven," the album sold over a million copies. In 1974 Jones nearly died after suffering two aneurysms (irregular stretching of blood vessels) two months apart. After a six-month recovery he was back at work, touring and recording with a fifteen-member band, with which he released the album Mellow Madness.

After Jones's 1980 album The Dude won five Grammy awards, he signed a deal with Warner Brothers Records to create his own label, Qwest. It took Jones almost ten years to make his next album, Back on the Block. During that time he produced hit albums for other artists, including Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983), which is still one of the bestselling albums of all time with forty million copies sold. Jones also has one of the bestselling singles of all time, "We Are the World," to his credit. Another triumph for Jones in the mid-1980s was his production of The Color Purple, the film version of Alice Walker's (1944–) novel, which featured the first film performance of Oprah Winfrey.

Later years

In the early 1990s Jones worked on a huge, ongoing project, "The Evolution of Black Music," for which he had been gathering material for years. He was back in television as well; the Quincy Jones Entertainment Company produced the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) comedy Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and as a weekly talk show hosted by Jones's friend the Reverend Jesse Jackson (1941–). Jones also worked on a film biography of the black Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Quincy Jones Broadcasting and Time Warner bought a New Orleans, Louisiana, television station, WNOL, which Jones was to oversee.

Quincy Jones has been married and divorced three times, and his six children have only recently been able to spend time with and come to know their father. The 1990 documentary Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones contains scenes in which Quincy discusses his difficult childhood, his mentally ill mother, and his strained past with his children. The film also contains interviews with Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and others who describe Jones as a hard worker with a creative brilliance that has influenced popular entertainment since 1950. In 1993 Jones started Vibe magazine, a well-received African American music journal. In 1995 he released Q's Jook Joint, featuring the talents of many of his friends such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder (1950–). The album was a celebration of his fifty years in the music industry.

In May 2000 the Quincy Jones Professorship of African American Music was established at Harvard University in Massachusetts. In January 2001 Jones received the first Ted Arison Award from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, named for the man who created the organization. Later that year Jones contributed a song to the Ocean's Eleven soundtrack, published Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, the story of his life, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. In February 2002 Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones won a Grammy in the best spoken word album category.

For More Information

Bayer, Linda N. Quincy Jones. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.

Jones, Quincy. Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Kavanaugh, Lee Hill. Quincy Jones: Musician, Composer, Producer. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1998.

Ross, Courtney Sale. Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. New York: Warner Books, 1990.

JONES, Quincy

Composer and Producer. Nationality: American. Born: Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., in Chicago, Illinois, 14 March 1933. Education: Attended Seattle University, Washington; Berklee School of Music, Boston; also studied with Boulanger and Messiaen in Paris. Family: Married 1) Jeri Caldwell, 1957 (divorced 1966); 2) Ulla Anderson, 1967 (divorced 1974); 3) the actress Peggy Lipton, 1974 (divorced 1990); seven children in all. Career: 1950–53—trumpeter and arranger for Lionel Hampton; then freelance arranger for Ray Anthony, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Peggy Lee; 1956—musical director, Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra; arranger for Barclay Discs, Paris; 1961—music director, then vice president, 1964, Mercury Records; composer of instrumental works, and for TV series Hey Landlord, 1966–67, The Bill Cosby Show, 1969, and Sanford & Son, 1972–77, and for the mini-series Roots, 1976; 1990s—executive producer of TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Jesse Jackson Show, In the House, Mad TV. Awards: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, 1994. Agent: Rogers and Cowan Inc., 1888 Century Park East, Los Angeles, CA 90067–7007, U.S.A.

Films as Composer:

1960

Pojken i trädet (The Boy in the Tree ) (Sucksdorff)

1964

The Pawnbroker (Lumet); Mirage (Dymtryk)

1965

Made in Paris (Sagal) (songs); The Slender Thread (Pollack)

1966

Walk Don't Run (Walters); The Deadly Affair (Lumet); Enter Laughing (C. Reiner)

1967

Banning (Winston); In Cold Blood (R. Brooks); In the Heat of the Night (Jewison); Ironside (Goldstone—for TV)

1968

A Dandy in Aspic (A. Mann); Jigsaw (Goldstone); The Counterfeit Killer (Leytes); For Love of Ivy (Daniel Mann); The Split (Fleming); The Hell with Heroes (Sargent); MacKenna's Gold (Lee Thompson); Split Second to an Epitaph (Horn)

1969

The Italian Job (Collinson); The Lost Man (Aurthur); Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Mazursky); Cactus Flower (Saks); John and Mary (Yates); The Out-of-Towners (Hiller); Blood Kin (The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots ) (Lumet)

1970

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (Douglas); Eggs (Hubley—short); Of Men and Demons (J. & F. Hubley—short); Up Your Teddy Bear (The Toy Grabbers ) (Joslyn); Brother John (Goldstone)

1971

The Anderson Tapes (Lumet); Honky (Graham); $ (The Heist ) (R. Brooks)

1972

The Hot Rock (How to Steal a Diamond in Four Uneasy Lessons ) (Yates); The New Centurions (Precinct 45 Los Angeles Police ) (Fleischer); The Getaway (Peckinpah); Killer by Night (McEveety)

1976

Mother, Jugs, and Speed (Yates) (songs)

1985

Portrait of an Album (+ d); Fast Forward (Poitier); Lost in America (Albert Brooks) (song); The Slugger's Wife (Ashby); The Color Purple (Spielberg) (+ co-pr)

1988

Heart and Soul (Pasquin) (+ co-exec pr)

1990

Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (Weissbrod—doc) (+ ro)

Films as Music Director:

1971

Man and Boy (Swackhamer)

1972

Come Back Charleston Blue (Warren) (+ song)

1978

The Wiz (Lumet) (+ songs)

1985

The Slugger's Wife (Ashby) (exec music pr); Fast Forward (exec mus pr)

Publications

By JONES: articles—

Vanity Fair (New York), July 1996.

On JONES: books—

Horricks, Raymond, Quincy Jones, New York, 1986.

Cuellar, Carol, Quincy Jones: Q's Jook Joint, Miami, 1996.

Kallen, Stuart A., Quincy Jones, Edina, 1996.

Kavanaugh, Lee H., Quincy Jones: Musician, Composer, Producer, Berkeley Heights, 1998.

On JONES: articles—

Cinestudio (Madrid), April 1973.

Dirigido por . . . (Barcelona), September 1974.

Ecran (Paris), September 1975.

Film Dope (Nottingham), no. 28, December 1983.

Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), July 1996.

Variety (New York), 18 November 1996.

Jet, 31 May 1999.

With the incorporation of jazz and pop styles into film music in the 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that composers from such backgrounds would be commissioned to compose film scores. Quincy Jones's experience as an arranger, composer, and performer made him particularly adept at matching the disciplines of these styles to the demands of the medium.

Jones has brought to film music a range of influences from Latin stylings to American blues. Such influences are apparent in his first major score, for Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker. The urban realism of Lumet's film is balanced by equally authentic musical accompaniment, showing not only Jones's facility with jazz, but also with Puerto Rican and other ethnic musical idioms. Jones's handling of these elements led to his scoring a number of crime films and social dramas with contemporary urban settings. In many of these works, he combined modern rhythms with melodic pop themes reminiscent of the work of Henry Mancini.

This approach made Jones a natural choice for contemporary directors seeking a "new" sound. The score for Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night employs bluegrass and blues elements appropriate to its Southern setting while Jones's music for Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood incorporates unusual percussive effects, throbbing bass lines, and even a use of bottles at one point. Jones has also continued to work on and off for Lumet, serving as arranger and conductor for the filmmaker's production of The Wiz, adapted from William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls's hit Broadway musical. Jones gained further recognition in the motion picture industry as one of the producers and the musical coordinator for Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. Assembling a team of composers, orchestrators, and musicians, Jones constructed a score that combines a broad spectrum of musical influences, from African rhythms to jazz and blues. The music also contains more traditional approaches to film scoring, as in a lyrical symphonic theme which bears in its principal woodwind line a resemblance to Georges Delerue's main theme for Our Mother's House. Above all, Jones's work for The Color Purple demonstrates his ability not only to handle a variety of musical styles but also his influence as a producer.

The Color Purple aside, from the mid-1970s on Jones became less active in films, turning his attention more to arranging and conducting and, in particular, to his film and television production company, Quincy Jones Entertainment. He also established his own broadcasting company to acquire television and radio properties. And in recent years he has become an elder statesman among American (and even more specifically, African-American) composers/arrangers/music producers. In 1990, he was the subject of a documentary/homage, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, a portrait in words, music, and images in which his "genius" is acknowledged by a diverse group of celebrities, from Dizzy Gillespie to Ice T, Miles Davis to Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand to Big Daddy Kane.

—Richard R. Ness, updated by Rob Edelman