Quincy Jones, a titan of American entertainment who worked with stars from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and Will Smith, has died at the age of 91.

Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, said he died Sunday evening at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

“Tonight, it is with full but broken hearts that we share the news of the passing of our father and brother Quincy Jones,” the family said in a statement. “And while this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the amazing life he lived and know there will never be another like him.”

Jones was perhaps the most versatile pop cultural figure of the 20th century, perhaps best known for producing the albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad for Michael Jackson in the 1980s, which made the singer the biggest pop star of all time. Jones also produced music for Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and many others.

He was also a successful composer of dozens of film scores and had numerous chart hits under his own name. Jones was a bandleader in big band jazz, an arranger for jazz stars like Count Basie, and a multi-instrumentalist, most adept on trumpet and piano. His TV and film production company, founded in 1990, had great success with the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and other shows, and he continued to innovate well into his eighties, launching Qwest TV, an on-demand music TV, in 2017 . employ. Jones is third behind Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the most Grammy Award nominations of all time – 80 to their 88 each – and is the third winner of the awards, with 28.

Jones was born in Chicago in 1933. His half-white father was born to a Welsh slave owner and one of his female slaves, while his mother’s family was also descended from slave owners. His introduction to music came through the walls of his parental home through a neighbor’s piano, which he began learning at the age of seven, and through his mother’s singing.

His parents divorced and he moved with his father to Washington state, where Jones learned drums and a variety of brass instruments in his high school band. At age 14, he started playing in a band with 16-year-old Ray Charles in Seattle clubs, once, in 1948, as Billie Holiday’s backup. He studied music at Seattle University, moved east to continue in Boston, then moved to New York after being rehired by jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton, with whom he had toured as a high school student (a band for which Malcolm X was a heroin). dealer when they played in Detroit).

In New York, he played trumpet in Elvis Presley’s band in an early gig for his first TV appearances, and met the stars of the blossoming bebop movement, including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. (Years later, in 1991, Jones conducted Davis’s final performance, two months before he died.)

Jones toured Europe with Hampton and spent much time there in the 1950s, including a period to further his studies in Paris, where he met such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. At the age of 23, he also toured South America and the Middle East as musical director and arranger for Dizzy Gillespie. He assembled a crack team for his own big band, which toured Europe to test Free and Easy, a jazz musical, but the disastrous run left Jones, by his own account, near suicide and $100,000 in debt.

He got a job at Mercury Records and slowly paid off the debt with extensive work as a producer and arranger for artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Sammy Davis Jr. including The Italian Job, In the Heat of the Night, The Getaway and The Color Purple. (He produced the last of these, which was nominated for eleven Oscars, three for Jones himself.) In 1968, he became the first African-American to be nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars, for The Eyes of Love from the film Banning . (alongside songwriter Bob Russell); he had a total of seven nominations. For TV he scored programs such as The Bill Cosby Show, Ironside and Roots.

His work with Sinatra began in 1958 when he was hired by Grace Kelly, Princess Consort of Monaco, to conduct and arrange Sinatra and his band for a charity event. Jones and Sinatra continued to work on projects until Sinatra’s final album, LA Is My Lady, in 1984. Jones’ solo musical career began in the late 1950s, recording albums under his own name as a bandleader for jazz ensembles that included such luminaries as Charles Mingus. Art Pepper and Freddie Hubbard.

Jones once said of his time in Seattle, “When people write about the music, jazz is in this box, R&B is in this box, pop is in this box, but we did everything,” and his Catholic tastes served him well as well as modern. pop mutated from the swing era. He produced four million-selling hits for New York singer Lesley Gore in the mid-1960s, including the US No. 1 It’s My Party, and later embraced funk and disco, with hit singles such as George Benson’s Give Me the Night and Patti Austin and Baby Come to Me by James Ingram, along with records by the band Rufus and Chaka Khan, and the Brothers Johnson. Jones also released his own funk material and scored US Top 10 albums with Body Heat (1974) and The Dude (1981).

His greatest success in this style was his work with Michael Jackson: Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, while Jones’ versatility between Off the Wall and Bad allowed Jackson to metamorphose from smooth disco to ultra-synthetic funk rock. He and Jackson (along with Lionel Richie and producer Michael Omartian) also helped produce We Are the World, a successful charity single that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia in 1985. “I lost my little brother today, and a part of my soul went with him,” Jones said when Jackson died in 2009. In 2017, Jones’ legal team successfully argued that he was owed $9.4 million in unpaid Jackson royalties, although he lost on appeal in 2020 and had to pay back $6.8 million.

After the success of The Color Purple in 1985, he founded the film and TV production company Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990. His biggest movie hit was the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran for 148 episodes and launched Will’s career. Smith; Other shows included the LL Cool J sitcom In the House and the long-running sketch comedy show MadTV.

He also founded the media company Qwest Broadcasting and, in 1993, the black music magazine Vibe in partnership with Time Inc. Throughout his career he supported numerous charities, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Jazz Foundation of America. and others, and mentored young musicians, including British multiple Grammy winner Jacob Collier.

Jones’ illustrious career was nearly cut short twice: He narrowly avoided being murdered by Charles Manson’s cult in 1969 because he planned to go to Sharon Tate’s house there on the night of the murders, but Jones forgot the appointment. He also survived a brain aneurysm in 1974, which left him unable to play the trumpet in case the effort caused further damage.

Jones was married three times, first to his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell, for nine years until 1966, and fathered his daughter Jolie. In 1967 he married Ulla Andersson and had a son and daughter. In 1974, he divorced to marry actor Peggy Lipton, best known for roles in The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. They had two daughters, including actor Rashida Jones, before divorcing in 1989. He had two more children: Rachel, with a dancer, Carol Reynolds, and Kenya, his daughter with actor Nastassja Kinski.

He never remarried but continued dating a string of younger women, raising eyebrows because of his long-time collaboration with 19-year-old Egyptian designer Heba Elawadi when he was 73. He also claimed he dated Ivanka Trump and Juliette Gréco. He is survived by his seven children.