Legendary Music Composer and Producer Quincy Jones Dies at 91

His resume of high-profile projects reads like a list of essential cultural touchstones — scoring the TV series Roots, producing and composing for the film The Color Purple, and conducting and producing the multi-artist song “We Are the World,” to raise money for African famine relief. Jones won an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony and 28 Grammys (with 80 nominations), plus three special Grammy awards. In 2013, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Born Quincy Delight Jones Jr. on March 14, 1933, he grew up quickly, seeing firsthand, by age 7, the seamiest of Chicago’s underworld. He aspired to the gangster life after going to a wrong neighborhood and being nailed to a fence with a switchblade through his hand.

“As a young kid, after my mother was taken away, my brother [Lloyd] and I, we saw dead bodies every day,” Jones told GQ. “Guys hanging off of telephone poles with ice picks in their necks, man. Tommy guns and stogies, stacks of wine and liquor, big piles of money in back rooms, that’s all I ever saw. Just wanted to be that.”

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones with Grammy Awards Jackson won at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards, February 28, 1984.

Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images

Both his parents had been college-educated. His father, who worked as a carpenter, was unable to care for the boys on his own and shipped them off to Louisville, Kentucky, where they lived with their impoverished grandmother. (“In the winter,” Jones told Oprah Winfrey, “there was literally frost on the floor.”) She sent them to the river to hunt rats, which she killed and fried with greens for dinner. Looking back, Jones told GQ he took it in stride. “Meat is meat. She’d put seasoning in with it. And red beans and rice … I mean, when you’re hungry.”

He was 10 when his father reunited the family and moved them to Bremerton, Washington, and remarried. Jones had a tense relationship with his stepmother and suffered a traumatic car crash at 14 when a bus struck the vehicle in which he was riding, killing all four of his companions. “Reached up and pulled my friend, and his head fell off,” he told GQ. Jones never learned to drive as a result.

But it was in Washington where he found his path, discovering the trumpet, playing wedding gigs with a blind pianist named Ray Charles and going on to win a scholarship to Boston’s prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in the early 1950s. At 20, he set off with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger on a European tour.

By 1956, he was seemingly everywhere, playing, for example, second trumpet in the Dorsey Brothers band on TV’s Stage Show, supporting 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his six appearances there. He left to work as a musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, and by the early 1960s, Jones had established himself as an in-demand arranger and producer, the man behind Count Basie recordings and Lesley Gore’s top-selling singles “It’s My Party” and “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” His 1964 arrangement of Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” was the rendition astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin played when they landed on the lunar surface in 1969. 

In 1974, Jones suffered a brain aneurysm, which necessitated surgery and left a metal clip in his head. It ended his playing days, though he never thought of retiring. “I’ve seen what happens to guys when they retire. They just dry up,” he said.

He was married and divorced three times, the last to actress Peggy Lipton in a union that lasted 16 years. The couple had two daughters, Kidada and Rashida, both of whom became actors. His only real regrets, he told Oprah Winfrey (whose movie career he started with The Color Purple), were about his children — seven with five different women: “When they were growing up, I didn’t know how to be there for them.”

He claimed to speak 26 languages, and his personality was as big as his talent. Blunt, brash and opinionated, Jones openly dismissed such artists as the Beatles and Taylor Swift, and he sued the Michael Jackson estate in 2017 over underpaid royalties, a $9.4 million win that was largely overturned in 2020.

Jones also founded the urban music magazine Vibe and established his own record label, Qwest, in 1980. In 2001, he published Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. 

“Your dreams always have to be big,” he said. “And mine were huge.”