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 with Michael Jackson.There was very little Jones did not do in a music career of more than 65 years. He was a trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, composer, producer and winner of 27 Grammy Awards.
Everything he did was stamped with his universal and undeniable hipness. U2 frontman Bono called Jones “the coolest person I’ve ever met”. His father, a carpenter, remarried and moved the family to Bremerton in Washington state, where young Quincy pursued a life of petty crime. 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 U.S. government-sponsored tours around the world with a band organized by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Jones then led his own band through Europe. Jazz purists called him a sell-out for making pop music, but Jones later told Rolling Stone: “The underlying motivation for any artist, be it Stravinsky or Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music they want and still have everyone buy it.”“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”.