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Music Impresario
Quincy Jones was born March 14, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois and is an American record, television and film producer, musician and songwriter. Jones is especially well known for his work with Michael Jackson as the producer of Jackson's most famous albums (Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad).
Jones got his first break as a trumpeter for the Lionel HamptonOrchestra in 1951. Throughout the 1950s, he became a skilled arranger and led many small bands.
In 1957, he began a career as a record producer at Barclay Records and worked in France.
1960sIn 1960, he was hired by Mercury Records as the first black vice president of a major record label. When jazz became less popular, he was asked to produce some pop singles; his first was the hit It's My Party by Leslie Gore.
In 1962 he wrote Soul Bossa Nova, a tune which became famous decades later as the "Austin Powers Theme".
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s where he began writing film scores. Jones scored many films, including In Cold Blood, "The Pawnbroker", "In the Eyes of Love", and "Mirage".
He has also composed several television theme songs, for shows such as Ironside (which featured the early use of a synthesizer), and Sanford and Son.
In 1969, he recorded Walking In Space, an early Jazz fusion record.
1970sDuring the 1970s Quincy began producing more pop and less jazz. This drew criticism that he was selling out.
In 1971, he composed the theme to the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie.
In 1977, Sidney Lumet asked Jones to score The Wiz, an updated Wizard of Oz. It was there that he met Michael Jackson and they soon agreed that Jones would produce Jackson's solo albums.
It is difficult to talk about his career because he has had so many, and nearly all have overlapped: songwriter, composer, musician, producer, arranger, improviser, bandleader, A&R executive, film and television composer, record company president, magazine publisher, entrepreneur, tastemaker. He is, or has been, all of those things, and he has worked with some of the greatest names in music from the past five decades: Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Oscar Pettiford, Dinah Washington, the Reverend James Cleveland, Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderley, Aretha Franklin, Milt Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, Michael Jackson and so many others.
His accomplishments trace the course of popular music over the second half of this century. He was producer of both "We Are The World" and Michael Jackson's Thriller, until recently the biggest selling single and album of all time. He was the first high-level African American executive of an established major record company, as well as the first major African American film composer. He arranged the first song played on the moon. He is the all-time most nominated Grammy artist (77), and has won the second-most number of Grammys (26). He has scored, at last count, 33 films, including The Pawnbroker, The Slender Thread, Walk Don't Run, Enter Laughing, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, For the Love Of Ivy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Cactus Flower, MacKenna's Gold, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, The Anderson Tapes, The Getaway, The New Centurions, The Wiz, and The Color Purple.
It would be difficult to find a person in the Western World whose life has not been touched by the work of Quincy Jones. Other accomplishments Jones also produced the We Are The World single in the mid 1980s.
In 1989 Jones produced "Back On The Block" which included stars Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, George Benson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan, as well as Big Daddy Kane and other rap and hip-hop stars.
TV production credits include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Film production credits include The Color Purple.
Jones has won 26 Grammy Awards and received Kennedy Center Honors in 2001.
Each year the Uncommon Height Award is presented to the person or persons who exemplify the spirit and tradition of Dorothy Height through a lifetime of service to others.
Quincy Jones and his lifelong friend Count Basie.
(from Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones )
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