Quincy Jones, the producer who helped shape popular music for some fifty years, has died at 91. His publicist said he passed away peacefully at his home in California.
NPR’s Walter Ray Watson described a talent that made music which hooked the ear, warmed the heart and got people dancing. Jones’s partnership with Michael Jackson cracked the pop world wide open, with his production on songs such as “Bad,” “Billie Jean” and “Rock with You.” The records he worked on sold more than a hundred million copies, among them Thriller, the best-selling album ever. It is easy to forget that record executives once doubted he was the right man to produce Jackson’s debut as an adult solo artist.
A Chicago childhood
Born Quincy Delight Jones Jr., he was the son of a Chicago carpenter and a mother who sang church songs around the house. The Depression-era neighbourhood was rough. “Gangsters. Lot of them are gangsters,” he told NPR’s Michele Norris in a 2008 interview, recalling machine guns in the thirties. When he was 10, the family moved to Seattle, where his father took a shipyard job as part of the war effort.
Jones was, by his own account, a ringleader of mischief as a boy. One day he and a group of friends broke into a rec center and ate a roomful of freshly baked pies. Then he opened a door. “I saw a piano,” he recalled, and something deep inside told him to open the door again. He crossed the room slowly, he said, and felt goose bumps. That moment, he said, changed his life.
From trumpet to the executive suite
By high school he had taken up the trumpet. Soon afterward he struck up a lifelong friendship with Ray Charles, then a blind 16-year-old pianist. Still a teenager, Jones was hired by the vibraphonist and bandleader Lionel Hampton.
Years of producing and scouting talent followed. Mercury Records then promoted him to an executive post, a first for a Black man at a major label.
