QUINCY JONES

(14 March 1933 – 3 November 2024)

Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was not just a musician: he was a jazz arranger, producer, composer of film and other songs and a conductor, too. He was a bandleader and, from his earliest days he played the trumpet which was nearly the cause of his death some fifty years ago. Quincy Delight Jones Jr was born in Chicago to a baseball player and carpenter, also named Quincy Delight, and Sara Frances, a schizophrenic bank officer and apartment manager, who encouraged him in his music. His father remarried a woman with three children and they had another three together. After World War II, the family moved to Seattle where Quincy on trumpet and Charles Taylor on sax played with a National Reserve band.

By the age of twenty he was with the Lionel Hampton Band and then stayed in New York to look for writing work. He appeared with the Dorseys, Elvis Presley, Dizzy Gillespie and then moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. His career flourished in all directions. In 1961 he became vice-president of Mercury Records and began writing for films, the first being Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker with Rod Steiger. Jones subsequently wrote some forty film scores, including Walk, Don’t Run with Cary Grant, John le Carre’s The Deadly Affair with James Mason and Lumet again, and Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood from the book by Truman Capote. Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night was outstanding not only for Jones’ music but for the fact that Sidney Poitier, playing a black homicide detective (the first ever on film), had to slap a white police chief (Rod Steiger). The film won five Oscars and Jones wrote the score for the first sequel, They Call Me Mr Tibbs!. The Italian Job with Michael Caine, Cactus Flower with Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman, The Anderson Tapes with Sean Connery, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway with Steve McQueen, all had scores by Quincy Jones.

In addition, Jones arranged music for Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Peggy Lee, and composed for TV (Roots, Ironside, Sanford and Son, The Bill Cosby Show, etc). He also went on to write pop songs for Leslie Gore including ‘You Don’t Own Me’ and ‘The Look of Love’. Producing the soundtrack for The Wiz introduced him to Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. When Jackson was looking for a producer for his solo album, Jones stepped in and Off the Wall sold some 20 million units. He then produced Jackson’s Thriller which, shifting an estimated 70 million copies, became the best-selling album of all time, as well as generating a phenomenal seven top-ten singles. Jones just never stopped working and then turned film producer on Steven Spielberg’s The Colour Purple, which earned eleven Oscar nominations including three for Jones. One of his biggest productions was getting together a slew of recording artists for the ‘We Are the World’ concert, with the money raised going to famine relief in Ethiopia. He was also a political supporter of Martin Luther King, and as one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music, saw it working towards the establishment of a national library of African-American art and music.

It is likely that overwork affected his health because in 1974 he suffered a brain aneurysm. His family arranged a memorial service for him in case his days were numbered. He attended the service with his neurologist and many of the black artists he had worked with. But he recovered and later had brain operations to insert a special clip in his head. He was warned never to blow the trumpet again, in case the clip broke. Ignoring the advice and while performing in Japan he had a head pain. The clip had come loose and so he never played trumpet again, yet still lived to be 91.

Quincy Jones married Jeri Caldwell in 1957 and they had a daughter, Jolie. An affair with Carol Reynolds produced another daughter, Rachel. He later married the Swedish photographer and actress Ulla Andersson, by whom he had another daughter and a son. After divorcing Andersson, he married the actress Peggy Lipton and had two more daughters and a divorce. He also lived with the actress Nastassja Kinski and had yet another daughter, Kenya.

Quincy Jones was showered with awards throughout his career. He was the first African-American to win the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and many national and international honours also went to this great man of music.

MICHAEL DARVELL