Quincy Jones
1933
Jones, Quincy Delight, Jr.
(b. March 14, 1933, Chicago, Ill.), African American arranger, composer, and entertainment industry executive who has worked in music, film, and television.Quincy Jones has had several careers in popular entertainment, including roles as a big-band musician, composer-arranger, record company executive, producer of films and music videos, and partner in a television production company. He has emerged as one of the most influential figures in Hollywood. He commenced his music career in
Seattle, Washington, where his family moved during the mid-1940s from Chicago, Illinois. He sang in a vocal harmony group directed by Joseph Powe, who had once been with Wings Over Jordan. After trying various instruments in high school band, Jones settled on the trumpet.As a teenager, Jones played in local
jazz and rhythm and blues (R&B) groups. He became acquainted with Ray Charles, an early musical influence, who moved to the Seattle area in 1950. Besides leading his own trio, Charles wrote and arranged for the five-member R&B vocal group in which Jones sang. Before he was 16, Jones had written his first suite, From the Four Winds, which later earned him a scholarship to Seattle University. Dissatisfied with the university's offerings, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Berklee School of Music.Jones also found work in the big-bands of Jay McShann (1949) and
Lionel Hampton (1951-1953). While with Hampton, Jones played in a trumpet section that featured two superb jazz stylists, Clifford Brown and Art Farmer. Jones made his mark not by his playing but through his skilled arrangements. After leaving Hampton, he freelanced as an arranger and with his own big-band led various recording dates, most memorably the sessions that produced This Is How I Feel about Jazz (1956). He provided arrangements for Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Tommy Dorsey, and others. In 1956 Jones helped organize and wrote many of the arrangements for a new big-band for Dizzy Gillespie, touring Africa, Asia, and the Middle East under the auspices of the U.S. State Department — the first time a jazz group was chosen for such cultural diplomacy.Jones settled in Paris for several years, where he studied arranging, organized a big-band, and worked for Barclay Records as an arranger and producer. He also studied arranging with Nadia Boulanger. In 1961 he returned to the United States and became head of artists and repertoire (A&R) at Mercury Records. Three years later, he became Mercury's first African American vice president. During this period, Jones stopped playing the trumpet in order to devote his energies to composing and arranging. His music increasingly employed R&B and pop elements, including dance rhythms and electric instruments.
In the 1960s, Jones moved to
Los Angeles, California, and soon became one of the most successful composers and arrangers in the film industry. He followed in the footsteps of Benny Carter, the alto saxophonist, composer, and arranger who played a key role in challenging the color barrier in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. According to Jones's biographer Raymond Horricks, white composer Henry Mancini aided Jones in his move into film music. Jones provided scores for many films, including The Pawnbroker (1965), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The New Centurions (1972), and The Wiz (1978). In 1974 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and underwent brain surgery. Upon recovering, he returned to work with undiminished vigor. He arranged and wrote music for numerous television programs of the 1970s, including The Bill Cosby Show (see Bill Cosby), Ironside, Sanford and Son (see Redd Foxx), and the miniseries Roots (see Alex Haley).During these years, Jones further extended his role in the entertainment industry. In 1980 he established his own record label, Qwest. Later in the decade he expanded into movie producing. In addition to composing the film score, Jones served as one of the coproducers for the 1985 movie version of
Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. He also showed his ability to master popular musical styles and media, as in the hit albums and music videos that resulted from collaborations with Michael Jackson, including Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1984), and Bad (1987).Jones became a highly visible figure in American popular culture. In the mid-1980s, he was one of the driving forces behind USA for Africa, producing the We Are the World (1985) album and video. In the 1990s his production company developed a number of television programs, including the hit series Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which debuted in 1990. Jones received his first Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) in 1963, and by the mid-1990s he had received nearly two dozen Grammys, making him the most honored musician in the award's history. In 1997 he produced the televised Motion Picture Academy Awards ceremony.
Periodically, however, Jones has returned to his jazz roots. In 1964 he arranged and conducted It Might as Well Be Swing, an album that featured Frank Sinatra with the
Count Basie orchestra, and 20 years later he conducted and produced Sinatra's L.A. Is My Lady. In 1983 Jones conducted a big-band tribute to trumpeter Miles Davis, and in 1991 he appeared with Davis in one of the trumpeter's final public performances — a concert highlighting the collaborations between Davis and arranger Gil Evans — which was released on video and compact disc as Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux (1993).More representative of Jones's musical vision, however, is the Grammy Award-winning Q's Jook Joint (1995), which pays tribute to the
jook joint, a distinctly African American place for music, dancing, and socializing. Like Jones, this album — which features an eclectic mix of instrumental jazz riffs, R&B ballads, pop music and hip hop rhythms, and rap vocals — is hard to categorize. "I'm all for de-categorizing the different musical pigeonholes," Jones has said. "Basically, they are all related anyway — blues, jazz, and gospel music, it's all the same thing."Contributed By: