by Bill Trott

(Reuters) – Quincy Jones, known simply as “Q”, had a major impact on American music with his work with artists ranging from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra, and reshaped pop music with his collaborations with Michael Jackson.

Jones died Sunday at the age of 91, the publicist said.

There was little that Jones didn’t do in his more than 65-year musical career. He was a trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, composer, producer and winner of 27 Grammy Awards.

A studio workaholic and a virtuoso at handling fragile egos, he shaped recordings by jazz greats like Miles Davis, produced Sinatra, and the superstar who recorded music’s biggest hit, “We Are the World,” at the 1985 fundraiser It brought the community together. It’s time.

Jones was also a prolific film score writer and co-produced the film “The Color Purple” as well as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the 1990s television show that launched Will Smith’s career.

Jones’ circle of friends included some of the best-known names of the 20th century. He had dinner with Pablo Picasso, Pope John Paul II. He met John Paul, helped Nelson Mandela celebrate his 90th birthday, and once retreated to Marlon Brando’s South Pacific island to escape a crisis.

Everything he did bore the stamp of his universal and undeniable elegance. U2 frontman Bono called Jones “the coolest person I’ve ever met.”

Jones’ most enduring successes came from his collaboration with Jackson. They made three important albums that changed the landscape of American popular music: “Off the Wall” in 1979, “Thriller” in 1982 and “Bad” in 1987. “Thriller” sold 70 million copies and six of the album’s nine songs reached the top 10.

MUSICAL INTRODUCTION

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on March 14, 1933 in Chicago. As a child, he aspired to be a gangster like the ones he saw in his tough neighborhood. He was 7 years old when his mother was taken to a mental hospital. His father, a carpenter, remarried and moved the family to Bremerton, Washington state, where young Quincy pursued a life of petty crime.

Jones said his interest in music in Bremerton was sparked when he found a piano after sneaking into the community center in the wartime segregated housing project where he and some friends lived.

He tried different instruments in the school orchestra before playing the trumpet, and by the age of 13 he was playing jazz, popular music and rhythm-and-blues in nightclubs. When Jones was 14 in Seattle, he met the not-yet-famous 16-year-old Ray Charles, who taught him how to arrange and compose music.

Basie and trumpeter Clark Terry would also mentor the young Jones, and he later earned a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. However, as a young trumpeter in the early 1950s, he gave up going on the road with Lionel Hampton’s band.

“Music was the only thing I could control,” Jones wrote in his autobiography. “It was the only world that offered me freedom… I didn’t have to look for answers. The answers were no further than the bell of my trumpet and my scribbled, penciled notes. Music made me plump, strong, popular, confident and cool.”

In the late 1950s, he went on worldwide tours sponsored by the US government with a band organized by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Jones later led his own group in Europe. Deep in debt when he took a job at Mercury Records in New York in the early 1960s, he became one of the first Black executives at a white-owned record company.

There Jones broke out of the jazz genre and produced her first hit single, the Lesley Gore song “It’s My Party”, which topped the US pop chart in 1964.

Jazz purists dismissed him as a sellout for making pop music, but Jones later told Rolling Stone: “The fundamental motivation of any artist, whether it’s Stravinsky or Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music he wants and still have everyone buy it.”

At Mercury, Jones got his first film scoring job on Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker.” He composed music for nearly 40 films, including “In the Heat of the Night”, “In Cold Blood”, “Mackenna’s Gold”, “The Wiz” and the television miniseries “Roots”.

The people Jones worked with would fill out a jazz or R&B hall of fame: Basie, Gillespie, Tommy Dorsey, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin. But he has also produced other genres, including Paul Simon, Amy Winehouse, Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer.

He arranged Sinatra’s hit song “Fly Me to the Moon”, which astronaut Buzz Aldrin played on tape during the first moon landing in 1969. Years later, Jones told GQ magazine that Sinatra “called me and was like a little kid: ‘We found the first music on the moon, man!'”

His own recordings were equally eclectic; It was changing direction from jazz to soul, from Africa to Brazil. In 1991, his album “Back on the Block” won the Grammy award for album of the year, as well as Grammy awards for rap, rhythm and blues, jazz fusion and instrumental.

Jones’ work with Jackson was historic, but Jackson’s record company initially thought Jones was too attractive to become a producer. They began with “Off the Wall” in 1979, after the singer broke away from his brothers in the Jackson 5 to create a mix of dance tracks and ballads. The album included four songs that reached the top 10.

Their 1982 collaboration “Thriller” became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s. Jones and Jackson wanted to expand Jackson’s fan base and added rock elements; They had guitarist Eddie Van Halen play an impressive solo on “Beat It,” which became one of Jackon’s biggest hits ever. During MTV’s coming of age, “Thriller,” complete with dazzling videos featuring Jackson’s mesmerizing dancing, established the artist as one of the world’s biggest stars.

DIVINE COOPERATION

Hits like “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and the title song made “Thriller” the best-selling album of all time. It earned Jones three Grammys and Jackson seven.

“Bad” followed in 1987 with five No. 1 hits, including “Smooth Criminal” and “Man in the Mirror.”

In 1985, Jones, Jackson and singer Lionel Richie released a record called “We Are the World” to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The huge all-star chorus included Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen and Smokey Robinson. Jones set the tone for the recording session with a sign that read: “Leave your ego at the door.”

Jackson died in 2009, and Jones later sued the estate, stating that he had been “defrauded” of royalties. In July 2017, a Los Angeles jury awarded Jones $9.4 million.

Jones founded his own record label, Qwest, as well as Vibe, a magazine covering the hip-hop world, and has several foundations and humanitarian projects.

He continued to launch new projects well beyond the traditional retirement age. “I’ve never been busier in my life,” Jones, 84, told GQ magazine in 2018.

Jones was married three times. His first wife was his high school sweetheart, Jeri Caldwell, with whom he had a daughter; His second wife was Swedish model Ulla Andersson, with whom he had two children, including hip-hop producer Quincy III.

His third wife was “Mod Squad” actress Peggy Lipton, with whom he had two daughters, including actress Rashida Jones. Outside of their marriage, he had two other children, one of whom was with actress Nastassja Kinski.

(This story has been refiled to add a word that was omitted in paragraph 1)

(Writing and reporting by Bill Trott; Editing by David Gregorio and Angus MacSwan)