For seven decades, Quincy Jones was the king of music behind the scenes. Without him, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, or Aretha Franklin would not have shined. Undoubtedly, Jones has been the greatest producer, arranger, and composer of pop, R&B, and jazz of all time. His death at 91 years old in his Bel Air mansion leaves music orphaned.
His private life is as dense as his professional one. Quincy Jones' childhood and that of his brother Lloyd were marked by their mother's schizophrenia, so by the late 1930s, their father took them to live with their maternal grandmother. She was a former slave worker. Their father, a carpenter who worked for local gangsters and found a job at a shipyard, soon started a new life with Elvera, with whom he had six more children.
Despite the family reunification, Quincy and Lloyd experienced a Cinderella story firsthand as they felt neglected and abandoned by their stepmother. The producer wanted to escape poverty as soon as possible. A first step was naturally playing a piano that was in a recreational center where they went to ask for food. At 11 years old, he was already eager to conquer the world.
He joined the school choir, learned to play various wind instruments, reeds, and percussion, and at 13, he convinced trumpeter Clark Terry to give him some lessons. Divine providence had a pleasant surprise in store for him because at 14, he met Ray Charles, who was 16 at the time, and who introduced him to the heroin underworld. Together, they created some of the most successful songs of the 20th century.
Producer Quincy Jones.Gtres
While attending Berklee College of Music, he played in the band called Hampton and gradually solidified his romantic life with his high school girlfriend, Jeri Caldwell, with whom he had his daughter Jolie (72). The couple married five years later in 1957. This first marriage was fraught with social difficulties because at that time, it was frowned upon for a black man to marry a white woman.
After working as a musical director in trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's band, recording his first album -This is How I Feel About Jazz- and working at Barclay Records, he signed with Mercury Records in 1958. That same year, Princess Grace invited him to a charity concert where he met Frank Sinatra, a close friend of the Princess of Monaco.
The year 1964 ended with a historic record as he became the first black vice president of a record label owned by whites and won his first Grammy for the arrangement of I Can't Stop Loving You by Count Basie and worked for the first time with The Voice in It Might as Well Be Swing with Count Basie. They would later collaborate again on Sinatra At The Sands (1966) -Sinatra's first live album- and on LA Is My Lad (1984). From the mid-60s onwards, the craziest period of his life began due to the number of projects and personal changes. He had a brief relationship with dancer Carol Reynolds, who gave him a daughter, Rachel (61).
In 1967, he married Swedish model Ulla Andersson (78), with whom he had two children, Martina (57) and Quincy III (55). The couple separated in 1972 but did not divorce until two years later so that Quincy could marry actress Peggy Lipton, from whom he divorced in 1990 after having two daughters, Kidada (50) and Rashida (48).
During his third marriage, he achieved milestones such as the soundtrack for In the Heat of the Night (1967) and The Color Purple (1985), in addition to being a producer of the seriesThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Until his passing, he was the third musician with the most Grammy awards, as out of 80 nominations, he won 28. He also received honorary titles from Princeton, Harvard, and Berklee universities, a National Medal of Arts, and the Legion of Honor, among many other distinctions. At the time of his death, according to Celebrity Net Worth, he had a fortune of 500 million dollars.