Background

Ethnicity: Quincy Jones is an African-American descent with distant English, Scottish, and Welsh roots.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on March 14, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He is a son of Quincy Delight Jones Sr., a carpenter and baseball player, and Sarah Frances Jones, maiden name Wells, a musically talented Christian Scientist. The family lived on Chicago's South Side, a notoriously tough and gang-ridden area. Matters did not work out well for Quincy's parents in Chicago, and they divorced soon after his younger brother, Lloyd, was born. His mother began to suffer from severe headaches and spells of irrational behavior that eventually landed her in a mental institution in 1941. Jones learned as an adult that his mother's condition was probably the result of a vitamin B deficiency. His father found it difficult to care for his sons as a single parent, so for a time Quincy and Lloyd lived in Louisville with their grandmother, who cooked rats and twisted the heads off chickens with her bare hands. "She was an ex-slave," Jones recalled years later, "but she had moved up in the world since then. The lock on the back door of her little house was a bent nail, and she had a coal stove and kerosene lamps for light..."

In 1943, Jones Sr. paired up with a neighbor woman named Elvera, but the boys never bonded well with her. Jones Sr. worked for Chicago's notorious African-American gang, the Jones Brothers, which was engaged in a long battle protecting its turf from the Mob. The Jones boys had to leave town fast. Thus came the day in 1943 when Jones Sr. abruptly picked up the kids from a local barbershop and announced that "We're leaving." Stunned, Quincy asked: "Can we get our toys?" But the answer was no: "We don't have time." Immediately boarding a Trailways bus, the family headed for the West Coast where wartime jobs were plentiful and the racial climate supposedly more tolerant. Yet, when that bus made a meal stop in Idaho, they saw, as Jones recalled, that it was still no paradise: "We stopped in Idaho and we got out to eat, [but] they wouldn't let us eat at the white places so we had to go find a black family [in order to get a meal]." Upon their July 4th arrival in Bremerton, Washington, Jones Sr. scored a job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, but the tiny rental home they got was located in new, segregated housing development, a place way out of town called Sinclair Heights. Jones recalled they didn't even have a phone in the house and had to go to a telephone booth. A few weeks later, Elvera and her three kids arrived and the new family began settling in.

Quincy was introduced to music in Chicago by his mother, who was always singing religious songs, and by a next-door neighbor. But when Jones moved to Washington, his musical education began in earnest. His father worked long hours, and his stepmother did not treat him warmly, preferring her own children from a previous marriage and ones she had with Quincy’s father. Food was not plentiful, and spending money hard to come by. So, in Bremerton, Jones hustled newspapers and shined shoes. For food, he hung around a recreation center, where his musical interests intensified. The small, woodsy navy port town of Bremerton provided the Jones kids with plenty of opportunities for indoor and outdoor activities - and mischief. The community's recreation center was the local armory, and it was the site of a caper in which Quincy and some new pals broke in and ate up the stock of lemon meringue pie. Upon being caught, he ended up in the office of Mrs. Ayres, the supervisor, where he spotted "a little spinet piano over in the corner" and after daring to plunk a key "every cell in my body and every drop of blood said, "This is what you're gonna do the rest of your life." So he stayed and practiced the piano all day after that.

Education

Quincy Jones attended Navy Yard City Elementary School. Attending Robert E. Coontz Junior High School, Jones tried out a succession of instruments. He played percussion for a while, and stayed after school just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins. He couldn't get into that at all and finally found the B-flat baritone horn. Jones also picked up the trombone but ultimately settled on the trumpet, acquiring one at Kerns Music Shop in downtown Seattle.

Along the way, Jones received some encouragement from Coontz's music teacher, Harold Jeans, and even from a few musicians in the Navy Yard. He also picked up a few pointers from Eddie Lewis, an African-American who worked at the Sinclair Heights Barbershop and also played some trumpet. Lewis's son, David Lewis, would later help forge the region's "Northwest Sound" with his rock 'n' roll group, the Dave Lewis Combo. When Jones was 12, an African-American music teacher, Joseph Powe, recruited him into a boys gospel quartet, the Challengers, which made its debut in a concert at Seattle's Moore Theatre. Powe also led a swing band that thrilled Jones at its rec center gigs: "I used to get butterflies when I stood in front of that band. They had real music, written by hand, with numbers on it, and copied out, not like the stock music that's printed. That was like big-time stuff, because that's what Woody Herman had. That's what [Count] Basie had." Jones also began babysitting the bandleader's children so that he could sneak a peek at Powe's band charts, and he had an early epiphany: "I'd look at his Glenn Miller arranging books and it was like walking into this fantasy land, just to be able to look at those things with the trombones and how they worked. How you put the saxes and trombones and stuff together. I was just hooked on it. I must have been about thirteen. It took over my life." But Jones also got an early glimpse of lowdown music-making by hanging around outside Sinclair Height's juke joint, Dick Green's Cafe, where he overheard blues bands imported from Seattle and California.

In 1947, work in Bremerton dwindled and the Jones family moved across Puget Sound to Seattle and settled into a new home and Jones began attending the town's most racially diverse school, Garfield High. Within mere weeks, Jones was enrolled in music lessons at Frank Waldron's School of Saxophone & Trumpet, and he also joined Garfield's chorus - and the band, led by Parker Cook, where he became a bit of a star player. Before long, Jones met another Waldron student, saxophonist Charles Taylor, who was the son of local pioneering jazz pianist Evelyn Bundy. Her Garfield Ramblers combo was one of the Northwest's first African American jazz bands during the Roaring Twenties. By autumn Taylor began recruiting members to form a band. Besides corralling Jones, he brought aboard Oscar Holden Jr. (saxophone) and his sister Grace Holden (piano), both children of Seattle jazz piano legend Oscar Holden. After a few rehearsals, the Charles Taylor Band debuted by playing a few lunch-break dances, Garfield's spring season talent show, and then a paying gig at the "Black" YMCA.

Meanwhile, Jones was also soaking up music via the radio and by spinning records in the listening booths at the Sherman Clay & Co. music shop. He was inspired by a lot of people being young, by every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. He was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through. When Count Basie's band played Seattle's Palomar Theatre in 1947, Jones met the band's ace trumpet player, Clark Terry, and persuaded the man to give him some lessons in the early mornings before school began. Later, he began to write charts for Bumps Blackwell Band.

At the age of 14, Quincy Jones was involved in a car accident that further refrained him from learning how to drive.

In 1948, Jones befriended a local singer-pianist, only three years his senior. His name was Ray Charles Robinson. The two formed a band and played in local clubs and weddings, and soon Jones was composing and arranging music for the group. Looking back, Jones would later recall that he told Robinson about not understanding how to arrange songs for multiple horns in a band. And by way of responding, Robinson hit a B-flat-seventh chord in root position and a C-seventh above that, and there it was, the eight-note chord with the Dizzy Gillespie sound. He hit that thing, and the whole world opened up. Everything from then on made sense. Jones started coming over for lessons when Robinson was getting up from the gig the night before. Ray showed him charts he was writing on Dizzy's "Emanon," and when he heard Quincy's charts on gigs with Bump's band, he made suggestions that helped Quincy's writing take a big leap forward. The kid's grateful admiration got through the defenses Ray Charles kept up with most other musicians, and the two became close friends, big brother, and little brother, listening to records, and going to each other's gigs. Two years after making his splash in Seattle - playing gigs with Quincy in Bumps Blackwell's band and cutting his debut record, Confession Blues, there - Robinson would be lured to Los Angeles, where, under his new stage name of "Ray Charles," he would soon take the world by storm and forever change popular music.

At 18, Jones won a scholarship to Seattle University, where a young Clint Eastwood - also a music major there - watched him play in the college band. Eastwood, a noted jazz aficionado, wrote the foreword to The Complete Quincy Jones. After only one semester, Jones transferred to Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship. But an offer from Lionel Hampton to tour as a trumpet player with his band pulled him away from college. In 1957, Jones moved to Paris in order to study with Nadia Boulanger, an expatriate American composer with a stellar track record in educating composers and bandleaders.

Quincy Jones earned an honorary degree from Seattle University in May 1990; an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music in 1983; an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005; an honorary doctorate of humanities degree from Morehouse College on May 20, 2007; also awarded an honorary doctorate degree fro Princeton University on June 3, 2008; an honorary doctorate of arts from Washington University in St. Louis on May 14, 2008; an honorary degree from the University of Washington on June 14, 2008; an honorary doctorate of music from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University on May 8, 2010.

Career

In 1951-1953, Quincy Jones worked as a trumpeter and arranger of Lionel Hampton Orchestra. After moving to New York, he began taking on freelance arranging and recording work for stars including: in 1954, Roy Haynes, James Moody, Paul Quinichette, and Manhattan's proto-rock 'n' roll group, the Treniers; and, in 1955, Cannonball Adderley, Betty Carter, Helen Merrill, Sonny Stitt, Clark Terry, and Dinah Washington. In 1956, he was hired as a trumpeter and musical director, touring South America and the Middle East with Dizzy Gillespie's big band. Later that year ABC-Paramount Records offered Jones his own contract and he cut his debut album, This Is How I Feel About Jazz. That same year, he produced sessions for jazzers Billy Taylor and Milt Jackson and also cut his second LP, Go West, Man!. He simultaneously signed on as music director for the Barclay Disques record label, and he proceeded to arrange studio sessions with the likes of Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, and Henri Salvador. In 1958, he had the chance to work with Frank Sinatra at the Monaco Sporting Club - a connection that would lead to great things later.

The year 1959 saw Jones cutting two albums - The Birth of a Band and The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones - and after having led several concert tours throughout Europe with different bands, Jones invited several of his old Seattle AFM Local 493 peers (Floyd Standifer, bassist Buddy Catlett, and pianist Patti Bown) to join him in a big band in Europe for a nine-month tour. But all that touring brought Jones serious financial problems.

That's about when the president of Mercury Records stepped up with an offer that made Jones the musical director of the label's New York division, and he carried on working as an arranger for major jazz stars, including Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan. Along the way Jones also arranged sessions for big-band icons Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, and Duke Ellington; R&B stars Big Maybelle and LaVern Baker; pop singers Brook Benton and Lena Horne; the momentarily reformed rocker-turned-gospel-singer, Little Richard; and even his old Seattle pal, Ray Charles.

In 1960, Quincy Jones cut the I Dig Dancers LP, and in 1961 he cut four more albums including Around the World and Newport '61. His Big Band Bossa Nova LP of 1962 yielded the classic tune Soul Bossa Nova, which was reprised as a soundtrack feature in Woody Allen's movie Take the Money and Run and was even sampled by the Dream Warriors for their 1991 hip-hop tune, My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style. Quincy Jones Plays the Hip Hits was released in 1963, the same year that his sessions with New York teen sensation Leslie Gore produced three huge pop hits (It's My Party, Judy's Turn to Cry, and She's A Fool), which were followed by You Don't Own Me in 1964.

That same year Jones was rewarded with a promotion to vice president at Mercury, making him the first African-American to rise to an executive position within a major record company. He was a music director since 1961. Also in 1964 Jones reunited with Sinatra, who hired him to arrange and conduct It Might as Well Be Swing, an album that included the classic tune Fly Me to the Moon. The duo collaborated again on the Sinatra at the Sands LP in 1966, but before then, also in 1964, Jones was invited to score a soundtrack to an upcoming film, The Pawnbroker. With that achievement under his belt, Jones decided to relocate to Hollywood, and he parted company with Mercury.

It was 1965 when Jones moved to Los Angeles, where he soon became involved in scoring movie soundtracks, including Mirage (1965) and Walk, Don't Run (1966). But his real breakthrough came with the score he wrote for The Slender Thread, the classic 1966 Sidney Poitier drama based on the true story of a Crisis Clinic suicide call-center incident in Seattle, where parts of the film were shot. Increasingly renowned for his silky arrangements, Jones was soon in demand for both film and television, ultimately cutting some fifty soundtracks, including In Cold Blood (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and The Italian Job (1969), and themes for TV shows, including Ironside (1967) and Sanford and Son (1972). In July 1969, his music went interstellar when astronaut Buzz Aldrin played Jones and Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon during Apollo 11, NASA's first lunar-landing mission. In the meantime, Jones was enticed into signing with A&M Records.

In the early 1970s, Quincy Jones briefly managed a Seattle funk/soul band, the Black on White Affair; produced Billy Preston's I Wrote a Simple Song (1971); and produced Aretha Franklin's Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) (1973). In 1975, he founded his own company, Qwest Productions, which would release many albums. Between 1976 and 1978, Jones produced three hit albums for funk pioneers the Brothers Johnson and in that latter year, he also produced the soundtrack for The Wiz film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. In 1979, he delivered Jackson's breakthrough dance/pop fusion LP, Off the Wall.

As the 1980s dawned, Jones was poised to take on many new projects. His 1981 album, The Dude, was critically acclaimed, and it yielded multiple hit singles. The following year Jones won global admiration for the state-of-the-art production values on Michael Jackson's all-time best-selling album, Thriller. In 1984, Jones produced Frank Sinatra's L.A. Is My Lady, and he scored The Color Purple in 1985. Jackson and Jones reunited to produce the Bad LP in 1987. In 1988, Jones partnered with Warner Communications to create a new business entity, Quincy Jones Entertainment, which was slated to produce numerous movies and TV shows.

As the years went by, Jones's production skills brought him to collaborations with countless other jazz, pop, funk, and disco stars, including Patti Austin, Celine Dion, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, and Ernie Watts. His 1989 album, Back on the Block, was particularly ambitious. It fearlessly brought together an impossibly broad range of talents including jazz icons, pop/soul stars, cutting-edge hip-hop rappers, and Ray Charles. During the following year, Jones helped launch two new magazines, Vibe and SPIN, and in 1991 he forged an association with the Montreux Jazz and World Music Festival, for which he remains a co-producer. He also cut Miles Davis's final album, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux.

By 1990, Jones was ready for a substantial comeback. He helped create the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for NBC; Jones acted as executive producer, and Will Smith starred as the Fresh Prince, effectively launching his acting career under Jones' auspices. The next year, in 1991, Jones collaborated with Miles Davis for a Gil Evans tribute concert at the famous Montreux jazz festival, only two months before Davis' death. Reflecting on the opportunity with Down Beat, Jones said, "Claude Nobs, the founder of Montreux, had been after me to be his primary co-producer for three years, but I never had the time, until that year when we had Miles. I had no idea that Miles was ill. "The resulting album from the concert. Miles and Quincy: Live at Montreux (1993), won a Grammy for best jazz instrumental. In 1993, Jones merged his company, Qwest Records, which he had founded in 1981, with David Salzman Entertainment, creating QDE. In concert with Time-Warner, Inc., QDE continued the production of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and other shows for NBC and Fox, developed film projects, and launched the magazine Vibe, focusing on urban popular culture. On the 1995 album Q's Jook Joint, Jones collaborated with some of the biggest names in music again: U2's Bono, Ray Charles, Coolio, Gloria Estefan, Herbie Hancock, Brian McKnight. Barry White, Nancy Wilson, Stevie Wonder, and dozens more. In 1996 and 1997, Jones started two additional media ventures, QD7 (with David Salzman and 7th Level) and Qwest Broadcasting, one of the largest minority-owned broadcasting companies in the United States.

Warner Communications produced the biographical film, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, in 1990, and, in 2001, he published his best-selling book, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. In telling his life story, Jones is honest in detailing his numerous affairs, his failures as a father during his children's early years, his problems with prescription tranquilizers, and his breakdown. Jones also practices the collaborative method of his music in presenting an honest picture of his life, including chapters written by friends and family: his brother Lloyd discusses Jones's decision to break with his family when moving from Seattle, Ray Charles tells stories of their early years performing together, his third wife Lipton recalls the failure of their relationship, and two of his children relate the difficulties of establishing a relationship with a busy, famous - and at times irresponsible - father. For many critics, Jones's personal life made an even more interesting read than the details of his relationships with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Oprah Winfrey, and other big names. Around that same time, Jones visited Seattle's then-new music museum, the Experience Music Project (EMP), where the exhibit "Northwest Passage" spotlighted his Seattle roots in a gallery display that included his circa-1940s trumpet and rare photos he had offered on loan.

In October 2008, Quincy Jones's next book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions - Photos, Letters, Memories & More from Q's Personal Collection, was published, and 2010 saw the release of his album Q Soul Bossa Nostra. In 2014, he produced the documentary feature Keep On Keepin' On, alongside Paula DuPre Pesmen. In 2016, Jones and Don Mischer co-produced the opening ceremony of the African American Smithsonian Museum on ABC Network featuring President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Usher, Stevie Wonder, and many others. Quincy Jones entered yet another new field of endeavor in 2017, lending his name to a new exchange-traded investment fund (ETF), the Quincy Jones Streaming Music, Media & Entertainment ETF. The fund, sub-advised by Vident Investment, is among the first to license the name of a well-known figure from the world of arts and entertainment to attract investors in the booming ETF market. On March 20, 2020, Jones had a cameo appearance on a music video by Travis Scott and Young Thug for the song Out West. He currently serves as the official Ambassador of the annual Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

In addition to Jones's life in music, he was also interested in socio-political causes. He helped found the Los Angeles-based Quincy Jones Workshops (which offered arts education to deprived inner-city youths), the nonprofit Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation (which works to connect youths with education, culture, music, and technology), and the We Are the Future project (which attempts to offer children in poor and destabilized areas a sense of hope). In 2007, Jones and the Harvard School of Public Health joined forces to advance the health and well-being of children worldwide through Project Q, a strategic initiative of the School's Center for Health Communication. Through the strategic use of media, Project Q challenged leaders and citizens of the world to provide essential resources to enable young people to achieve their full potential. A centerpiece of Project Q was the Q Prize, which recognized extraordinary leadership by public figures and social entrepreneurs who champion the needs of children. Currently, the Quincy Jones Foundation provides financial assistance to organizations that serve to help disadvantaged communities and support music initiatives worldwide.

Achievements

• Quincy Jones' creative magic has spanned over six decades, beginning with the music of the post-swing era and continuing through today's high-technology, international multi-media hybrids. In the mid-1950s, he was the first popular conductor-arranger to record with a Fender bass. His theme from the hit TV series Ironside was the first synthesizer-based pop theme song. As the first African-American composer to be embraced by the Hollywood establishment in the 1960s, he helped refresh movie music with badly needed infusions of jazz and soul. Now Jones stands as one of the most successful and admired creative artists and executives in the entertainment world.
  
  The all-time most nominated Grammy artist, with a total of 80 nominations and 28 awards, Quincy Jones has received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. His life and career were chronicled in 1990 in the critically acclaimed Warner Bros. film Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. In 2013, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2018, Quincy Jones was the subject of a feature-length documentary on his life and work - Quincy. Distributed by Netflix, the film was written and directed by his daughter, actress and filmmaker Rashida Jones, who carries on her father's legacy of artistry and social activism. At the 2019 Grammy Awards, the film was honored as the Best Music Film of the Year.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones

    (Musician, composer, producer, arranger, and pioneering en...)

    2001
  • Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones 1990

• music

  • Jazz Abroad 1955
  • The Quintessence 1961
  • Quincy Plays for Pussycats 1965
  • You've Got It Bad Girl 1973
  • The Dude 1981
  • Back on the Block 1989
  • Q's Jook Joint 1995
  • Q: Soul Bossa Nostra 2010

Religion

Quincy Jones believes in the God who is against the greed for wealth and abandons the theories of an afterlife. When asked whether he was religious, he explained that his friend, Romano Mussolini, turned him away from the Church. He told Jones about where the Catholics were coming from. According to Jones, Catholics have a religion based on power, money, fear, smoke, and murder. And the biggest gimmick in the world is a confession: "You tell me what you did wrong and it'll be okay."

Politics

In 2018, Quincy Jones accused President Donald Trump and "uneducated rednecks" of stoking racial tensions in the United States. He said, "The racism in the North is disguised. You never know where you stand. That's why what's happening now is good, because people are saying they are racists who didn't used to say it. Now we know. He added, "A symphony conductor knows more about how to lead than most businesspeople - more than Trump does. Someone who knows about real leadership wouldn't have as many people against him as he does." Jones also weighed in on 2020 presidential campaign rumors surrounding his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey: "I don't think [Oprah] should run. She doesn't have the chops for it."

Views

Quincy Jones thinks race relations still have a long way to go in the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, Jones worked as a social activist, supporting such programs as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. He joined the board of Rev. Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). Jones also helped form the Institute for Black American Music in an effort to bring more appreciation to African-American music and culture. In 1985, Jones produced We Are the World, a charity song to raise money for the victims of the Ethiopian famine. A further project of Jones is the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, which connects South African children with education, culture and technology, and facilitates cultural exchange between underprivileged youths from Los Angeles and South Africa.

Speaking about music, Jones denounced the lack of innovation across different genres. He said today's pop music lacks originality, however, he enjoys some modern musicians.

Quotations: "Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind."

"Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing."

"It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do."

"Melody is king, and don't you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they're not; they're just an accompanying factor. If they're good, you're really in good shape. Lyrics are written to be rewritten."

"Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful."

"A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!"

"Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country."

"If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture."

"Cherish your mistakes, and you won't keep making them over and over again. It's the same with heartbreaks and girls and everything else. Cherish them, and they'll put some wealth in you."

"I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever."

Personality

In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. But in person, he is far spikier and more complicated.

Physical Characteristics: Height: 5ft 7in (1.69m)

In 1974, Quincy Jones had a pair of brain aneurysms, and the prognosis was pretty grim. He made a decision to cut back on his schedule to spend more time with his family. Since it looked like he might not have much time left, his family and friends started planning a memorial service. Although Jones was in poor health, he talked his neurologist into letting him attend the service, which was held at the Shrine in Los Angeles. The doctor was worried that Jones' health would suffer if he got too worked up during the service, so he sat next to Jones throughout the ceremony. Jones later told Newsweek that staying calm "was hard to do with Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, Sarah Vaughn and Sidney Poitier singing your praises."

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  squash, soccer

• Music & Bands

  Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, Cream, Miles Davis, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Bruno Mars

Connections

Quincy Jones was married three times: to actress Jeri Caldwell from 1957 to 1966, to model Ulla Anderson from 1967 to 1974, to actress Peggy Lipton from 1974 to 1990. He has seven children: Jolie (born in 1954) with Jeri Caldwell, Rachel (born in 1963) with Carol Reynolds, Martina-Lisa and Quincy III (born in 1968) with Ulla Andersson, Kidada (born in 1974) and Rashida (born in 1976) with Peggy Lipton, Kenya (born in 1993) with Nastassja Kinski.

Quincy Jones had a brief affair with dancer Carol Reynolds that resulted in the birth of their daughter, Rachel. German actress and former model Nastassja Kinski dated Jones soon after her divorce from Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Moussa and Jones' divorce from Peggy Lipton, though Kinski is 28 years younger than Jones. The relationship lasted three years, and in 1993, the pair had a daughter, Kenya.

Father:

Quincy Delight Jones Sr.

Mother:

Sarah Frances Jones

Sarah Frances Jones was a bank executive, apartment complex manager, and a fine pianist who became ill while her son, Quincy Jones, was still young. She suffered from schizophrenia and was admitted to a mental hospital in 1941. Quincy's father could not stand it so he had to file for divorce and later remarried.

ex-wife:

Peggy Lipton

Quincy Jones was married to his third wife, The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks actress Peggy Lipton, from 1974 to 1990. Together the couple had two daughters, Rashida Jones and Kidada Jones, both of whom became actresses. Despite their divorce, Jones and Lipton still remain close today.

Daughter:

Kidada Jones

Son:

Quincy Jones

Daughter:

Jolie Jones Levine

Jolie Jones Levine is a United States actress, model, producer, vocalist, and author. As an actress and producer, she has been associated with the projects "Hunk," "Panic in Echo Park," and "Outliving Castro." A former Ford model, she has also been active in Hollywood as a musician and vocalist: she made her musical debut in 1996 in an invitation-only event conducted at the Jazz Bakery by her father Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey.

Daughter:

Kenya Julia Niambi Sarah Kinski Jones

Kenya Julia Niambi Sarah Kinski Jones is a United Sttes model who has walked the runway for Chanel and been featured in campaigns for Stella McCartney and Calvin Klein.

Daughter:

Rashida Leah Jones

Rashida Leah Jones is a United States actress, producer, director, and writer. She is best known for her small-screen roles in Parks & Recreation, The Office, and Angie Tribeca and on the big screen in The Social Network, The Muppets, and Celeste and Jesse Forever, which she also co-wrote. In 2015, she produced the documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which follows the lives of a group of young women who work in pornography. She wrote and directed the documentary Quincy about the life and career of her father in 2018.

Daughter:

Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones graduated from the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine in 1999 and owns a holistic animal hospital in Los Angeles.

Daughter:

Martina-Lisa Jones

Martina-Lisa Jones is a United States model. She featured in the March 1994 issue of Playboy Magazine.

ex-wife:

Jeri Caldwell

Jeri Caldwell was Quincy Jones' high school sweetheart from Seattle. The two were married in 1957, staying together for nine years before divorcing in 1966. Together they had one daughter, Jolie Levine.

ex-wife:

Ulla Andersson

Swedish model Ulla Andersson met Quincy Jones at a party held in honor of Frank Sinatra in New York in 1966, and she and Jones married only a year later, in 1967. Together they had two children, Martina and Quincy Jones III, and Andersson retired from modeling to raise them. She returned to Sweden with her children after she and Jones formally separated, but the two didn't divorce until 1974 so that Jones could marry his longtime partner, Peggy Lipton.

Brother:

Lloyd Jones

Lloyd Jones, a broadcast engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV, was a younger brother to Quincy Jones.

colleague:

Amy Winehouse

Quincy Jones' album, "Q: Soul Bossa Nostra," features big modern stars reinterpreting his past hits. One cut on the CD is a Jones' collaboration with Amy Winehouse. In one of the interviews, Jones told the story of how he first met Winehouse, at the London concert for Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday: "After I got off the stage, a nice man came over and said, "Would you mind saying a few words to my daughter?" I said, "Sure." And this little girl came over, and she was on her knees and she kissed my hand and said, "I know every record you made back to the "The Swingin' Miss 'D'" with Dinah Washington, which you did when you were my age, 24." And I looked down and I said, "Amy Winehouse." And we stood there and talked for a long time. The three of us, her father and I, were holding one another on the shoulder." And Jones said that he had some advice for the pop star, whose career was plagued by problems with drug and alcohol addiction: "It was the most amazing conversation because she's very smart, very aware - an amazing lady. I was trying to tell her to straighten up a little bit because I've got a few kids that I see the good in and the brilliance in. And she said she understood and everything else. I read her a letter my daughter at 35 sent to me. And she was moved. She couldn't finish it. She almost cried. And she said, "I understand, Mr. Jones." And she went out on the stage and sang the song, and then [in her subsequent concert] punched out one of the girls in the audience. But she's going to be O.K., man, this is a smart kid. We've got to take the time and love and be there for her until she gets it together."

Friend:

William Henry Cosby

Friend:

Oprah Winfrey

After working on the film The Wiz, Quincy Jones decided to try his hand at producing movies. He obtained the rights to Alice Walker's The Color Purple and miraculously convinced Steve Spielberg to direct the adaptation while working for scale. He ran into a bit of trouble casting the picture, though, when he couldn't find the perfect actress to play the part of Sophia. Then, on a trip to Chicago, he saw a young reporter named Oprah Winfrey who seemed like a great fit for the part. As Jones later wrote, "I had never heard a name like that. Oprah spelled backward is Harpo, and we needed to cast Sophia, who was married to Harpo in The Color Purple. It had to happen." The casting worked out so well that Oprah earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, one of 11 nominations the film received though the film did not win any.

Friend:

Ray Charles

Quincy Jones was convinced at an early age to explore music by his teenage friend Ray Charles. In one of the interviews, Jones has claimed that Ray Charles introduced him to heroin when he was only 15 years old, adding that Malcolm X was their dealer. Jones described hanging out with Ray Charles after performing together in the late 1940s: "After we finished at the Washington Social Club and a couple of other ones, we'd all go down to Jackson Street to the Elks Club. That's where all the bebop jam sessions were. Nobody got paid. We didn't give a damn. When they finished playing they'd go over in the corner and they had it on their thumb. I just snuck in the line and got me a little hit."

colleague:

Michael Jackson

Although collaborating with a huge number of musical icons, one of Quincy Jones' most notable career achievements was his work with Michael Jackson. After meeting whilst working on the film The Wiz in 1978, they struck up a collaborating friendship. Jones produced Jackson's 1979 record Off the Wall and due to the success of the album, he became the most famous and sought-after producer in the industry. He went on to produce the iconic 1982 record Thriller which sold more than 110 million copies worldwide, and remains the worlds best-selling album. Jones also produced Jackson's album Bad in 1987. He developed a working relationship with Jackson that no-one else outside his family could match. Although he criticized Jackson in Vulture, calling him "Machiavellian" and claiming he "stole" songs such as Billie Jean, their collaboration is one of the most influential in the music industry.

Friend:

Eddie Murphy

Friend:

Will Smith

Quincy Jones helped create the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for NBC, where he acted as executive producer, and Will Smith starred as the Fresh Prince, effectively launching his acting career under Jones' auspices.

Friend:

Romano Mussolini

friend, colleague:

Lisette Weiner Derouaux

Publicist Lisette Weiner Derouaux and Quincy Jones started off as friends after they met at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1995, and Derouaux became Jones's publicist, serving as the executive director and vice president of his Listen Up Foundation. They didn't remain "just friends" for long, and they developed a romantic relationship that lasted about six years, eventually breaking up because Derouaux wanted children and Jones did not, having already fathered seven kids. Jones produced the song "Lisette" about their relationship, and the two are still on friendly terms, with Derouaux even introducing Jones to her now-husband, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.

friend, colleague:

Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra and Quincy Jones' very first collaboration was in June 1958 to raise money for the United Nations Refugee Fund. Jones was working in Paris for Barclay Records when he got a phone call from the office of Princess Grace Of Monaco stating that Frank Sinatra wanted him to assemble an orchestra for a concert to be held at the principality's Sporting Club. Elated by the prospect of working with one of his musical idols, Jones handpicked 55 musicians and took them with him on a train down to the French Riviera. On his first meeting with Sinatra, the singer offered few instructions. "He didn't say more than ten sentences to me the whole time," remembered Jones. "He walked into the rehearsal, hit me with those steely blues, and said, "You've heard the records, you know what to do."

Though the concert was a triumph (Sinatra complimented Jones: "Yeah, nice job, Q"), six years passed before the pair would collaborate again. In 1964, Sinatra rang to ask if Jones could arrange and conduct a studio session he was doing with the great Count Basie and his band. Impressed by Sinatra's professionalism and work ethic in the studio, Jones saw up close the singer's genuine appreciation for big-band music and the musicians that made it possible. The Quincy Jones-arranged sessions were released as It Might As Well Be Swing and included "Fly Me To The Moon," which was instantly hailed as a classic. For Jones, working with Sinatra took him to another level, as he acknowledged in 2001: "Looking back, that call from Frank was a major turning point in my career and my life." During the sessions, Sinatra and Jones became friends - Sinatra even surprised Jones one morning by cooking him breakfast - and they went on to enjoy a close relationship that persisted right up to Sinatra's death, in 1998. Jones regarded Sinatra as a mentor. "Frank was my style. He was hip, straight up, and straight ahead, and above all, a monster musician," he wrote in his 2001 memoir, Q: The Autobiography Of Quincy Jones.

References

• Quincy Jones Productions