Entertainment legend Quincy Jones dies at 91

The Grammy award-winning songwriter and producer of some of the most iconic songs of several generations - from “It’s My Party” to “Fly Me to the Moon” to “Thriller” to “We Are the World” has died.

Quincy Jones was 91 years old.

Arnold Robinson, Jones’ publicist, said he was surrounded by family when he died Sunday night at his home in Bel Air, The Associated Press reported. A cause of death was not released.

“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. “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 born in Chicago to a father who was a carpenter and a mother who sang hymns around the house, the AP reported. But his mother also suffered from mental illness and had to be institutionalized, he said.

“There are two kinds of people; those who have nurturing parents or caretakers, and those who don’t. Nothing’s in between,” Jones once told Oprah Winfrey.

He said that his mother’s institutionalization made the world seem “senseless” to him. He escaped to the streets of Chicago and found a connection to gangs, stealing and fighting in the city.

“They nailed my hand to a fence with a switchblade, man,” he told the AP in 2018.

Thanks to a neighbor with a piano, he learned to play music.

He and his father eventually moved to Seattle.

Jones said he and a group of friends broke into a recreation center and he noticed a piano on the center’s stage.

“I went up there, paused, stared, and then tinkled on it for a moment,” Jones shared in his autobiography, the AP reported. “That’s where I began to find peace. I was 11. I knew this was it for me. Forever.”

He started taking lessons from Clark Terry and eventually a then-unknown Ray Charles, CNN reported.

Jones started performing with jazz bands and started composing and arranging music there. He was only 15 when bandleader Lionel Hampton invited him to tour with his group. Hampton’s wife said the teenager was too young.

“I got on the band bus right away, and Gladys got on and said, “Hamp, what’s that child doing on the bus?” Jones told the National Endowment for the Arts, CNN reported. “And I was so upset. And she said, ‘Get him off here. Make him go back to school. We’ll call him later when he gets his schooling.’”

Jones listened and he completed school, earning a scholarship to then-Schillinger House, now Berklee College of Music, in Boston. In 1951 and claimed his spot with Hampton and his band.

He started arranging and recording with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles.

Jones was the first Black man to be a vice president for Mercury Records, CNN reported. The label had hired him as an artists-and-repertoire director in 1961 but promoted him to the vice president role within three years.

He had his first pop hit in 1963 - Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” while also working with Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee.

He scored “I Can’t Stop Loving You” for the Count Basie Band the same year, which won Jones his first Grammy.

The 1960s also saw Jones starting to compose soundtracks for such films as “In The Heat of the Night” and “In Cold Blood,” CNN reported.

He eventually worked with A&M Records before creating his own Qwest label.

In 1971, Jones was the first Black musical director for the Oscars.

He also created Quincy Jones Entertainment in a partnership with Time Warner, the AP reported.

Jones’ possibly biggest and most well-known project was producing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in 1982.

Three years later, Jones asked Jackson and other stars to come together for “We Are the World” to help combat famine in Africa. He and Lionel Richie produced a second version in 2010 for Haitian earthquake relief.

Over his long career, Jones won 27 Grammy Awards, USA Today reported.

He was listed as either a producer, composer, conductor, arranger or performer on more than 400 albums and composed about 35 film scores.

Jones didn’t just focus on music.

He produced the television show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the film “The Color Purple and founded the magazine Vibe in 1993. He sold the magazine in 2006, CNN and USA Today reported.

Jones had health problems over the years, including a brain aneurysm in 1974 that made him slow down a bit and spend time with his family. In the 1980s he suffered from a deep depression.

Jones had been married three times and had seven children with five women.

He married his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell in 1957 and had a daughter Jolie.

The couple divorced in 1966.

The next year he married Swedish model Ulla Andersson and the couple had two children Martina and Quincy the III. They divorced in 1974.

The same year he married Peggy Lipton and had two daughters, both actresses, Rashida and Kidada. Jones and Lipton divorced in 1990.

Jones had a daughter Rachel with dancer Carol Reynolds and another daughter Kenya with actress Nastassja Kinski.

Jones leaves behind seven children, his brother and two sisters, the AP reported.

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Through the years CIRCA 1950: Jazz trumpeter, composer, arranger and producer Quincy Jones poses for a portrait circa 1950. (Photo by Donaldson Collection/Getty Images) (Donaldson Collection/Getty Images)

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