US music titan Quincy Jones who produced Michael Jackson 's Thriller album and collaborated with artists including Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles has died aged 91.
READ MORE --US music titan Quincy Jones who produced Michael Jackson's Thriller album and collaborated with artists including Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles has died aged 91.
Along with Rashida, Jones - known to friends as 'Q' - is survived by daughters Jolie Jones Levine, Rachel Jones, Martina Jones, Kidada Jones and Kenya Kinski-Jones; son Quincy Jones III; brother Richard Jones and sisters Theresa Frank and Margie Jay. Read More Quincy Jones's heartbreaking final post revealed as touching message to his daughter He toured with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, arranged records for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and composed soundtracks for Roots and In The Heat Of The Night.
Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones at the 'We Are The World 25 Years for Haiti' recording session held at Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood in February 2010 'Thriller' sold more than 20 million copies in 1983 alone and has contended with the Eagles' 'Greatest Hits 1971-1975' among others as the best-selling album of all time.
But he looked back sadly on his childhood, once telling Oprah Winfrey that 'there are two kinds of people: those who have nurturing parents or caretakers, and those who don't. Nothing's in between.' Jones and some friends had broken into the kitchen and helped themselves to lemon meringue pie when Jones noticed a small room nearby with a stage. On the stage was a piano.
'That's when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.' Charles would struggle with heroin addiction for more than a decade, but Jones got out early and credits this to when he fell down five flights of stairs when he was high.
He was at ease with virtually every form of American music, whether setting Sinatra's 'Fly Me to the Moon' to a punchy, swinging rhythm and wistful flute or opening his production of Charles' soulful 'In the Heat of the Night' with a lusty tenor sax solo. Starting in the 1960s, he composed more than 35 film scores, including for 'The Pawnbroker,' 'In the Heat of the Night' and 'In Cold Blood.'He called scoring 'a multifaceted process, an abstract combination of science and soul.'
'And he went back and told the people at Epic Records, and they said, `No way - Quincy's too jazzy.' Michael was persistent, and he and his managers went back and said, `Quincy's producing the album.' And we proceeded to make `Off the Wall.' He was not an activist in his early years, but changed after attending the 1968 funeral of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and later befriending the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Jones was married three times, with his third wife Peggy Lipton dying in May 2019 aged 72 following a battle with cancer. Jones was awarded around £7.5million in 2017 for use of songs produced by Jones that were used in Jackson's concert film This Is It and two Cirque du Soleil shows. That came two years after Jackson's father Joe Jackson hit back at Jones after the producer gave a controversial interview in which he accused the King of Pop of 'stealing' some of his greatest music.
In June last year, Jones was taken to hospital after a medical emergency at his Los Angles home following a bad reaction to some food. But doctors later gave Jones the all-clear, and he was released. He was the subject of a 1990 documentary, 'Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones' and a 2018 film by daughter Rashida Jones. His memoir made him a best-selling author.
Quincy Jones, the man known simply as 'Q,' was a huge influence on American music in his work with artists ranging from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra and reshaped pop music in his collaborations Michael Jackson. Jones' circle of friends included some of the best known figures of the 20th century. He dined with Pablo Picasso, met Pope John Paul II, helped Nelson Mandela celebrate his 90th birthday and once retreated to Marlon Brando's South Pacific island to recover from a breakdown.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born March 14, 1933, in Chicago. As a boy, he aspired to be a gangster like those he saw in his rough neighbourhood. He was seven when his mother was taken to a mental health institution. In Seattle at age 14, Jones met 16-year-old Ray Charles, not yet famous, who taught him to arrange and compose music.
In the late 1950s he went on US government-sponsored tours around the world with a band organized by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. At Mercury, Jones got his first movie-scoring job, Sidney Lumet's 'The Pawnbroker.' He went on to score nearly 40 films, including 'In the Heat of the Night,' 'In Cold Blood,' 'Mackenna's Gold,' 'The Wiz' and part of the television mini-series 'Roots'.
Years later, Jones told GQ magazine that Sinatra 'called me up, and he was like a little kid: 'We got the first music on the moon, man!'' Their 1982 collaboration, 'Thriller,' became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s. Jones and Jackson wanted to broaden Jackson's fan base so they added rock elements, getting guitarist Eddie Van Halen to play a blistering solo on 'Beat It,' which became one of Jackon's biggest hits ever.
In 1985, Jones, Jackson and singer Lionel Richie organized 'We Are the World,' a record to raise money for fighting famine in Ethiopia.
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