Quincy Jones, Peerless Music Producer Behind 'Thriller,' Dead at 91

Quincy Jones, the musical polymath who contributed to remarkable albums in jazz, soul, and funk as well as several of the biggest pop LPs of the 20th century — most notably producing Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad albums — died at his home in Bel Air, California, on Sunday. He was 91 years old. 

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“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the family said in a statement, via The Associated Press. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”

Jones was at home in nearly every branch of popular music: During a career that spanned seven decades and included work as a trumpet player, composer, arranger, producer, conductor and scorer, his work touched on big-band jazz, bebop, gospel, blues, soul, funk, quiet storm R&B, disco, rock, and rap. He is best known for his involvement with Jackson, which brought an unparalleled level of musical dexterity to several of the most popular albums of all time and helped redefine what it meant to be a pop star.

“His body of work is incomparable. He had the ability to move seamlessly over seven decades —  from music genre to genre, artists young to old — and was a master with them all,” Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement. “Quincy was a true man of music who knew its unique and powerful ability to unite us all. He will be missed but will live on through his incredible body of work.”

But by the time Jones got to Jackson, he had already carved a path through jazz and early Sixties bubblegum pop and numerous film scores, studied with the famous classical composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, arranged records for Ray Charles, and conducted Frank Sinatra’s band. Few musicians in history have enjoyed such a richly varied career and success in as many arenas. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2017, Jones presented his creative restlessness as part of a lifelong commitment to learning as much about music as he possibly could. “You gotta hope you can make all the mistakes you can so you learn,” he said. “I made all the mistakes. All of ’em.” 

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An outsider might beg to differ — Jones had an unerring ear for great voices, and many of the finest singers in pop history appeared to love what he could do with their voice in the studio. As a result, Jones collaborated with Jackson, Sinatra, Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Minnie Ripperton, Al Jarreau, Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan, James Ingram, and Tamia, among others. 

Jones was famous for searching through hundreds of demos before settling on the right song for an artist, and once the tune was selected, he brought his formidable musical background to the recording sessions. “Normally you put three-part background vocals on the track, and it sounds good,” Stephen Bray, who wrote and produced for Madonna in the Eighties, told Rolling Stone in 2017. “You go with a more-or-less gospel approach: a fifth or a third of a chord singing behind the melody. If you listen to the backgrounds on [Jackson’s] Bad, not only are you getting those, you’re getting sevenths, you’re getting ninths and elevenths. In less experienced hands, it would sound like mud, but they managed to put in five-note chords. They got background vocals that sound like nothing we had ever heard before in that context.”

Whether creating a pop smash or a TV score, Jones was always staunchly committed to forward-thinking production. Most producers settle in and stop evolving at some point, developing a recognizable sound, but Jones was never one to get stuck in the past and dismissed as a revivalist, which helps explain why he was involved with Number One singles in three different decades. “We had the first Fender bass in 1953 — without a Fender bass connected to an electric guitar from 1939, there’d be no rock & roll or Motown,” he told Rolling Stone. “We did jazz records with it at first, one called ‘Work of Art’ by Art Farmer on Prestige Records. And my Ironside theme is the first time the public ever heard a synthesizer.”

Later, when recording with Jackson, Jones also employed the latest keyboard and programming technology to make propulsive records that still cut through at radio three decades later. “Quincy’s philosophy was an outhouse bottom with a penthouse view,” Whitney Houston producer Narada Michael Walden once told Rolling Stone. “It’s gotta have a stank on the bottom, and then be pretty with a skyline view on top. Then you can play it in the bar, the club, the yacht. It works everywhere.”

Long before Jones figured out how to make juggernaut singles and became one of the most decorated musicians in history, with 28 Grammy awards and a record 79 nominations, he grew up poor on the violent South Side of Chicago. He was born on March 14, 1933, during the height of the Great Depression. His mother suffered from mental illness and was sent to an asylum when Jones was young. Jones and his younger brother Lloyd lived for a time in their grandmother’s shack without electricity in Louisville, Kentucky, before returning to Chicago. They followed their father, a carpenter, out to Washington State, where he moved to work on a U.S. naval base during World War II. 

According to Jones’ autobiography Q, when he wasn’t stealing guns and ammunition from the military encampment near Sinclair Heights, his musical education went into overdrive. He remembers discovering a piano accidentally when breaking into the recreation center with friends to fill up on lemon merengue pie; he played a few notes and was hooked. “That’s where I began to find peace,” Jones writes. “I was 11. I knew this was it for me. Forever.”

He threw himself into the pursuit of music — singing in an a cappella group, risking beatings from his father to spy on the musicians playing at local “juke joints,” pestering the jazz trumpeter Clark Terry to give him lessons at the crack of dawn before school. At age 13, Jones was already attempting to write arrangements of his own for jazz big bands. 

Once the war ended, Jones’ family moved south to Seattle, where his musical education was turbocharged. At 14, he befriended a local musician with a promising future: Ray Charles. He also started playing in bands. “We had a regular routine on weekends: from 7 to 10 we’d work places like the Seattle Tennis Club playing … pop tunes,” he remembers in Q. “Then from ten to one in the morning we got loose at Black joints … playing R&B tunes … for the strippers. Then we’d play bebop jam sessions … until the break of dawn.” When Billie Holiday passed through town on tour, Jones was one of the local musicians who backed her up. The jazz great Lionel Hampton invited Jones to join his touring band for good when he was just 15, but Hampton’s wife demanded Jones finish school first. 

After a semester at Seattle University, Jones headed across the country to attend Berklee College of Music — then named the Schillinger House — which was close to the jazz hotbed of New York City. He soon joined Hampton’s band as a trumpet player, touring the U.S. and Europe and honing his arranging skills before quitting the group, tired of low pay and the relentless road schedule. As a quadruple threat capable of writing a song, arranging it, conducting a band through a session, and producing the recording to boot, his name started to appear in the credits of albums from titans in jazz: Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington. 

Jones moved to Paris in 1957 to work for Barclays Records, which allowed him to do arrangements with strings — in the U.S., this privilege was limited to white arrangers, according to Jones’ friend and collaborator Bobby Tucker, who worked with him on records for the singer Billy Eckstine. While in France, Jones also studied with Nadia Boulanger, who tutored many of the greatest classical music composers of the 20th century. And that’s where Frank Sinatra first recruited Jones, just 25 years old, to conduct a 55-piece orchestra during a performance in Monaco. He became closer to Sinatra in 1964: The Voice was enthralled by Jones’ work conducting and arranging Count Basie’s band, so he brought the whole unit to back him during a stint in Las Vegas and subsequent tour. 

During the early Sixties, Jones also showed his aptitude for making indelible pop singles. In Q, he recalls working as an A&R at Mercury Records when label founder Irving Green told him, “Your records are all great musically, but we could sure use some help with our bottom line.” Jones was soon producing Lesley Gore, who scored 10 Top 40 hits in the U.S. between 1963 and 1965, all hooky pop masterclasses. He also reached the mainstream by different means, branched out into Hollywood around this time. He fought movie-industry discrimination tooth and nail — Black film composers were rare and usually not called on to score “white” films. But Jones went on to write music for numerous TV series and films, including the Truman Capote adaptation In Cold Blood and the Sydney Poitier classic In the Heat of the Night. 

In 1974, Jones suffered an aneurysm and underwent a pair of life-saving brain surgeries. As a result, his days as a trumpet player were over: The pressure from the exertion of blowing on the horn could threaten his brain arteries. He began to pivot away from scoring, too, where the sheer volume of composition required was backbreaking. Instead, Jones started to record lustrous albums that mixed jazz, delicate funk, and impeccably arranged soul, working, per usual, with graceful singers — Riperton, Jarreau, Vandross — and talented musicians like Leon Ware (Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross) and Louis E. Johnson (who would go on to form the funk outfit the Brothers Johnson and hold down the bass on Jackson’s “Billie Jean”).

But one of Jones’ final film projects brought him close to Michael Jackson: He oversaw much of the music in the film adaptation of The Wiz, which starred Diana Ross and Jackson. Jones and Jackson became friends on set, and as Jackson was preparing to make his debut as a solo act after a highly successful run in the Jackson 5, Jones proposed that they work together. Epic Records initially balked at the idea. “The word was: ‘Quincy Jones is too jazzy, and has only produced dance hits with the Brothers Johnson,’” he writes in Q. But Jackson demanded Jones, and Epic relented. 

This led to one of the most fruitful musical partnerships in history. Jones produced Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad, which together resulted in 17 Top 10 hits on the Hot 100, including nine Number Ones, and sold more than 50 million units in the U.S., according to the RIAA. Jones put a team of crack musicians and songwriters and the most modern musical technology behind Jackson, resulting in stunningly sophisticated, rhythmically explosive hits. “It was this convergence of the most advanced technology in the known universe at your disposal mixed with old-school musicality,” said Bray.

At the same time, he scored other superlative hits: He produced George Benson’s Give Me the Night album — the lead single still lights up dance floors — and Donna Summer’s Donna Summer, which featured the great singles “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)” and “State of Independence.” He controlled the recording session for the superstar-ego pileup of “USA for Africa: We Are the World,” a charity single that included everyone from Paul Simon to Stevie Wonder to Bruce Springsteen to Cyndi Lauper. And Jones released The Dude, an album under his own name, that scored three Top 40 hits and helped launch the careers of James Ingram and Patti Austin. Jones won Producer of the Year, Non-Classical at the Grammys the following year (1982), the first of three times he took home that honor. 

Jones and Jackson parted ways after Bad; in Q, the producer writes that those around Jackson felt the producer was getting too much credit. Jackson also angled toward hip-hop on his next album, Dangerous, and wanted younger producers more familiar with the form. Jones continued to produce, giving an early boost to the careers of the R&B singers Tevin Campbell and Tamia, scoring three R&B Number Ones from his Back on the Block album, and making forays up the charts as late as 1996 with “Slow Jams,” a single he produced featuring Babyface, Tamia, and Barry White. During this decade, he also helped launch the magazine Vibe, which he envisioned as a counterpart to Rolling Stone that focused more on the work of Black musicians. 

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Jones was fond of describing his accomplishments in charming, pithy pronouncements: Likening music to “emotional architecture” or saying something along the lines of, “the least-favorite records of mine were ones at Numbers Two, Six and 11.” Other standbys included “just make music that gives you goosebumps” and “a great song can make the worst singer in the world a star; a bad song can’t be saved by the three greatest singers in the world.” These endearing quips made it seem like Jones’ accomplishments were effortless and perhaps even repeatable. The fact that no one has matched them suggests otherwise. Jones in 1991 became the eighth artist to receive the Grammy Legend Award, an honor that has only been given out to 15 acts in the history of the Recording Academy.

In recent years, his musical output slowed — though his catalog is still sampled with regularity, so his credit list continues to expand. He started managing young talent in the 2000s, including the jazz musicians Alfredo Rodríguez and Justin Kauflin, and in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, an online library of jazz video content. When the French TV producer Reza Ackbaraly approached Jones about starting the channel, he agreed to participate with the same zeal that characterized his lifelong approach to new ventures: “I said, ‘Oh yeah,’” Jones told The New York Times that year. “Let’s go.”