Quincy Jones, legendary music producer, executive who worked with Michael Jackson, Sinatra dies at the age of 91

BEL AIR, LOS ANGELES — Quincy Jones, a hit producer and longtime music industry powerhouse, died on Sunday. He was 91 years old.

His death was announced by his publicist Arnold Robinson, who said Jones died Sunday evening at his home in Bel Air, California. The announcement said Jones was surrounded by family, including his children and siblings, at the time of his death.

“And while this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the wonderful life he lived and know there will never be another like him,” the family said in a statement.

Jones’ historic career spanned from producing Michael Jackson’s record-breaking film “Thriller” to award-winning scores for films and television and working with Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles.

Jones rose from working with gangs on Chicago’s South Side to the heights of show business, becoming one of the first black executives to flourish in Hollywood and amassing a remarkable musical catalog that includes some of the richest moments of American rhythm and song. For years, it was difficult to find a music lover who did not have at least one album with his name, or a leader in the entertainment industry and beyond who did not have any connections with him.

Jones kept company with presidents and foreign leaders, movie stars and musicians, philanthropists and business leaders. He toured with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, arranged recordings for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, composed the soundtracks for “Roots” and “In the Heat of the Night,” organized President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ceremony, and oversaw the star-studded recording of “We Are the World.” ” – a 1985 charity record for famine relief in Africa.

Lionel Richie, who co-wrote “We Are the World” and was one of the lead vocalists, called Jones the “principal orchestrator.”

In a career that began when vinyl records were still played at 78 rpm, top honors probably went to his productions with Jackson: “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” are almost universal albums in terms of style and attractiveness. Jones’ versatility and imagination helped unleash Jackson’s explosive talent, which transformed him from child star to “King of Pop.” On such classic songs as “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, Jones and Jackson created a global soundscape of disco, funk, rock, pop, R&B and jazz and African songs. In the case of “Thriller,” some of the most memorable touches came from Jones, who recruited Eddie Van Halen for the guitar solo on the genre-blending “Beat It” and enlisted Vincent Price to provide the spooky voice on the title track.

In 1983 alone, “Thriller” sold over 20 million copies and equals the Eagles’ “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” as the best-selling album of all time.

“If an album doesn’t do well, everyone says, ‘it’s the producers’ fault’; so if he’s doing well, it should be your ‘fault,'” Jones said in a 2016 interview with the Library of Congress. “Songs don’t appear suddenly. The producer must have the skill, experience and ability to bring the vision to fruition.”

The list of his accolades and awards spans 18 pages of 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 French Legion of Honor, the Rudolph Valentino Award from the Republic of Italy, and the Kennedy Center Tribute for his contributions to American culture. He was the subject of the 1990 documentary “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones” and the 2018 film by daughter Rashida Jones. His memoirs made him a best-selling author.

2018: Quincy Jones dips his hands and feet in cement outside the TCL Chinese Theater

Born in Chicago in 1933, Jones cited the hymns his mother sang around the house as the first music he remembered. But he recalled his childhood with sadness, once telling Oprah Winfrey that “There are two kinds of people: those who have caring parents or guardians, and those who don’t. There’s nothing in between.” Jones’ mother suffered from emotional problems and was eventually placed in a halfway house, which made the world seem “meaningless” to Quincy. He spent most of his time in Chicago on the streets, with gangs, stealing and fighting.

“Man, they nailed my hand to the fence,” he told the AP in 2018, showing off his childhood scar.

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

“I went there, stopped, looked, and then jingled for a while,” 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 began playing the trumpet and befriended the young blind musician Ray Charles, with whom he became lifelong friends. He was talented enough to win a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out when Hampton invited him to tour with his band. Jones continued to work as a freelance composer, conductor, arranger and producer. As a teenager, he supported Billie Holiday. At the age of twenty he was touring with his own band.

“We had the best jazz band in the world, and yet we were literally starving,” Jones later told Musician magazine. “That’s when I discovered there was music and there was a music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between them.”

As a music executive, he overcame racial barriers to become vice president of Mercury Records in the early 1960s. In 1971, he became the first black musical director of the Academy Awards. The first film he produced, “The Color Purple”, received 11 Oscar nominations in 1986 (much to his disappointment, it did not win any). In cooperation with Time Warner, he created Quincy Jones Entertainment, which owned the pop culture magazine Vibe and Qwest Broadcasting. In 1999, the company was sold for $270 million.

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

He was at home in virtually any form of American music, whether setting Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” with its strong, rolling rhythm and wistful flute, or opening his production of Charles’ soulful “In the Heat of the Night” with a rousing saxophone solo rhythm tenor. He has collaborated with jazz giants (Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington), rappers (Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J), singers (Sinatra, Tony Bennett), pop singers (Lesley Gore) and rhythm and blues stars (Chaka Khan, rapper and singer Queen Latifah).

Only in “We are the World” the performers were 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 sampled songs by Tupac Shakur, Kanye West and other rappers. He even composed the theme song for the series “Sanford andSon.”

Jones was a moderator and star maker. He gave Will Smith a key role on the hit TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which Jones produced, and introduced audiences to Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg through The Color Purple. Starting in the 1960s, he composed over 35 soundtracks for films, including: to “Pawnshop”, “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 to his collaboration 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 sheets of paper with him containing the thoughts of famous thinkers. When Jones asked about the origin of one passage, Jackson replied “Socrates” but pronounced it “SO-crayts.” Jones corrected him: “Michael, they’re socks.”

“And the look he gave me then made me say, because I was so impressed with everything I saw in him during rehearsals, ‘I’d like to try producing your album,'” Jones recalled. “Then he came back and told the people at Epic Records and they said, ‘No way – Quincy is too jazzy.’ Michael was stubborn, so he and his managers came back and said Quincy was producing the album. And we started filming Off the Wall. Ironically, it was one of the best-selling Black albums at the time and saved the jobs of people who said I was the wrong guy.

Tensions emerged after Jackson’s death. In 2013, Jones sued Jackson’s estate, claiming he was owed millions of dollars in royalties and fees for producing some of the superstar’s biggest hits. In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, he called Jackson “as Machiavellian as possible” and alleged that he drew material from others.

Jones was addicted to work and play and sometimes suffered because of it. He almost died of a brain aneurysm in 1974 and fell into a deep depression in the 1980s after “The Color Purple” was rejected by Oscar voters; it never received a competitive Oscar. Jones, a father of seven children and five mothers, described himself as a “dog” who had countless lovers around the world. He was married three times, his wives included actress Peggy Lipton.

“For 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 youth, but he changed after attending the funeral of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and later becoming friends with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jones was committed to philanthropy, saying that “the best and only useful aspect of fame and celebrity is having a platform from which to help others.”

His goals included fighting HIV and AIDS, educating children, and caring for the world’s poor. He founded Quincy Jones Listen Up! foundation designed to connect young people with music, culture and technology, and said that throughout his life he had been guided by “a spirit of adventure and a criminal level of optimism.”

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

In addition to Rashida, Jones 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.

ABC News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.