Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones is an impresario in the broadest and most creative sense of the word, Quincy Jones’ career has encompassed the roles of the composer; artist; arranger; conductor; instrumentalist; record company executive; magazine founder; multi-media entrepreneur; humanitarian; investor; record, film, and TV producer. As a master inventor of musical hybrids, he has shuffled pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African, and Brazilian music into many dazzling fusions, traversing virtually every medium, including records, live performances, movies, and television.

Jones’s creative magic has spanned over seven decades, beginning with the music of the post-swing era, and continues to influence today’s high-technology, international multi-media hybrids. Named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century, Jones was born on March 14th, 1933, on the Southside of Chicago and raised in Seattle. He began playing the trumpet under the tutelage of the legendary, Clark Terry and continued his musical studies at the prestigious Schillinger House (now known as Berklee College of Music) in Boston. He remained there until the opportunity arose to tour with Lionel Hampton’s band as a trumpeter, arranger, and pianist at only 20 years old, and by the mid-50s, he was arranging and recording for musical greats such as Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Big Maybelle, Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley, and LaVern Baker.

In 1957, Jones furthered his musical education under the discipline of Nadia Boulanger, the legendary Parisian tutor who also instructed American expatriate composers such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. To subsidize his studies, he took a job with Barclay Disques, Mercury’s French distributor, and recorded many European artists, namely Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, and Henri Salvador, as well as American artists, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, and Andy Williams.

In 1961, Jones became the Vice President of Mercury Records and was the first high-level black executive of an established major record company. Toward the end of his association with the label, Quincy turned his attention to another sector of the industry that had been closed to African Americans—the world of film scores. As the first black composer to be embraced by the Hollywood establishment in the 60s, he helped refresh film scores with infusions of jazz and soul. In 1963, he scored the music for Sidney Lumet’s, The Pawnbroker, which would turn out to be the first of his nearly 51 major motion picture and television scores. Furthermore, Jones was the first popular conductor-arranger to record with a Fender bass, and his theme from the hit TV series, Ironside, was the first synthesizer-based pop theme song.

In the same year, Jones won the first of his 27 Grammy Awards for his arrangement of Count Basie’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and continued to work with Basie on Frank Sinatra’s classic Sinatra At The Sands, which contains the famous arrangement of “Fly Me To The Moon”: the first recording played on the moon by astronaut Buzz Aldrin when he landed in 1969.