Quincy Jones

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was an American record producer and composer. During his seven-decade career, he received dozens of accolades, including 28 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for seven Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.

Born in Chicago, Jones moved to Seattle with his family after World War II, where he attended the city's university. He then attended what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including "It's My Party") and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and the jazz artist Count Basie.

Jones produced three of the most successful albums by Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. He also composed numerous film scores including for The Pawnbroker (1965), In the Heat of the Night and In Cold Blood (both 1967), The Italian Job (1969), The Wiz (1978), and The Color Purple (1985), three of which earned him four of his nominations to seven Academy Awards. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the miniseries Roots (1977) and received a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical as a producer for the 2016 revival of The Color Purple.

Jones received many honorary awards, including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, and the posthumous Academy Honorary Award in 2025. He was also named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time. Jones died at the age of 91 in November 2024.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the elder of two sons to Sara Frances (née Wells; Later Taylor; 1904–1999), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones (1895–1971), a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. Quincy Jr.'s paternal grandmother was a formerly enslaved woman from Louisville, and he later discovered that his paternal grandfather was Welsh.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.