From the 1980s onwards, Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was best known for his production and arranging work with Michael Jackson, not least because his efforts on Jackson’s album Thriller made it one of the best-selling albums in the world. became pop history. But the superstar gloss that surrounded his work with Jackson often obscured the fact that there were many more layers to Jones’ abilities.

He worked with jazz stars such as Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, became a friend and collaborator of Frank Sinatra and developed a flourishing career as a composer of soundtracks for film and TV. Under his own name he enjoyed success in styles ranging from big band jazz and swing to pop, soul and funk. He became an influential music executive, a successful entrepreneur in film and TV production and launched the music magazine VIBE.

He was born in Chicago, the son of Quincy Jones Sr., a carpenter and semi-professional baseball player, and his wife Sarah (née Wells), a building manager. His parents divorced, Quincy Sr. remarried, and the family moved to Bremerton, Washington and then to Seattle during World War II. Quincy Jr. began playing trumpet and singing in a gospel quartet at age 12, and when he met teenage Ray Charles, also based in the Seattle area, Charles encouraged him to take an interest in arranging. A course at the Berklee College of Music in Boston landed Jones his first professional job in 1951 with bandleader Lionel Hampton.

His experiences on the road with the Hampton band were an eye-opener. “You couldn’t stay in white hotels, and for me, coming from Seattle, a lot of these things were a slap in the face,” he said. “Back then, all the black bands had white bus drivers so they could eat, because you couldn’t go to white restaurants. Even in Philadelphia they had segregated hotels.” Jones left Hampton in 1953, after accompanying the band on a European tour and interacting with a notable lineup of musicians, including trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer.

He started making a living writing arrangements for jazz stars like Basie and Tommy Dorsey. Although Jones served a stint as musical director of Gillespie’s ensemble in 1956, he was aware that the days of big bands were numbered and that rock ‘n’ roll was coming. “In a funny way, Lionel Hampton was one of the bands that was serious about a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility, before we even knew what the word meant,” Jones said.

In 1957 and 1958 Jones settled in France and Scandinavia. He continued to study composition – particularly with Nadia Boulanger, mentor to Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, among others – and went to work at Barclay Disques, the Paris-based subsidiary of Mercury Records. While in Europe, he formed his own star-studded big band and toured Europe and the US for two years. He wrote material for Count Basie and worked as an arranger and music director on recording sessions for vocalists such as Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1964, Jones won his first Grammy Award for his arrangement of Count Basie’s song I Can’t Stop Loving You. He also produced four million-selling singles for Lesley Gore, including the US chart-topper and UK Top 10 hit It’s My Party (1963). His hectic career was accompanied by an equally eventful private life. In his memoir Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (2001), he described how at one point he was dating five women at the same time.

His burgeoning profile was boosted by collaborations with Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Andy Williams. Jones’ association with Sinatra produced the albums It Might As Well Be Swing (1964) and Sinatra at the Sands (1966), both featuring Basie’s band. Jones and Sinatra became good friends, Jones later writing that Sinatra was “hip, straightforward and straightforward, and above all, a monster musician”.

Jones’ record gained him entry into the lucrative fields of film and television, and he became the first black composer to find acceptance in Hollywood. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, he was commissioned to write scores for more than thirty films and hundreds of TV shows. His better-known film projects include In Cold Blood (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Italian Job (1969) and The Getaway (1972). The Theme from Ironside is his most immediately recognizable work for the small screen, but his compositions for The Bill Cosby Show, Sanford and Son and his Emmy-winning work for the miniseries Roots proved enduringly popular.

As the 1970s progressed, Jones showed his instinct for keeping up with prevailing musical trends by delving into funk and disco music. His 1974 album Body Heat featured the Brothers Johnson as the rhythm section, and Jones went on to produce best-selling albums by the Brothers Johnson themselves.

Despite undergoing surgery to treat a double brain aneurysm in 1974, Jones continued to work at a breakneck pace. He produced chart-topping hits for disco queen Donna Summer and soul diva Aretha Franklin, and in guitarist George Benson he found another musical kindred spirit. Their collaboration on Give Me the Night (1980) – the debut release on Jones’s Qwest label – was another benchmark in his career: the album reached No. 3 on the US album chart, while the title track was a No. 4 single.

In the meantime, Jones scored hits under his own name. He had a US Top 30 hit with Stuff Like That (1978), and in 1981 scored a Top 10 album with The Dude, which produced the Top 30 hit Ai No Corrida (No. 4 in the UK) and the Top 20 hits Just emerged. Once and One Hundred Ways, both with James Ingram. In 1998, the hit film Austin Powers revived Quincy’s 1962 hip-shaker, Soul Bossa Nova; it was also used as the theme for the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France.

Jones first met Michael Jackson, then 12 years old, at Davis Jr.’s house, but it was not until Jones was working on the soundtrack for the film The Wiz (1978), starring Jackson and Diana Ross, that he was invited to produce a Jackson solo. album. This was the 20 million selling Off the Wall (1979). Their collaboration continued with Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987), the trio selling a combined 100 million copies. In between, Jones was also the natural choice to produce the 1985 charity single, We Are the World, co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie and performed by the all-star USA For Africa in aid of Ethiopian famine victims.

Jones was a crucial figure in helping musicians take control of the business side of their work. Like most other musicians, he had become accustomed to having his royalties and copyrights appropriated by unscrupulous publishers or record labels in the early years of his career. “When you write a song, 50% of it is getting published,” Jones explained. “They would say: ‘I want 50% of your creation’, so that means you get 25%. That was normal.” He started seeing the light when he got a job as an A&R man at Mercury Records in New York in 1961. Within two years, he was named vice president, becoming the first black executive of a major record label. “I had lost so much money when I had my band (the Jones Boys) in Europe that I had to go to a record company. Then I said, ‘I better pay attention to the other side, because that’s a music business.’”

After moving from Mercury to A&M Records, he launched Qwest, which became home to artists as diverse as New Order, Milt Jackson, the Winans and Tevin Campbell. Qwest also did excellent business with the soundtracks of Malcolm X (1992) and the rap generation film Boyz N the Hood (1991).

Jones rose to fame as an entertainment mogul, co-producing Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film The Color Purple and producing the soundtrack. In 1990 he worked with Time Warner Inc. to form Quincy Jones Entertainment; in 1991, he helped create the NBC television series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which launched Will Smith on his path to superstardom; and in 1993 he founded VIBE. He led a consortium of businessmen that formed Qwest Broadcasting, which bought TV stations in Atlanta and New Orleans.

Jones won an Emmy, 28 Grammys and three special Grammy awards, including the 1992 Grammy Legend Award, received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. 2013. He was showered with honorary doctorates, Time Magazine named him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century and in 1990 he was appointed knight of the Légion d’honneur, promoted to commander in 2001.

He was celebrated in the film Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (1990) and the documentary Quincy (2018), directed by his daughter Rashida.

Three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Jolie, 1st to Jeri Caldwell; a daughter, Martina, and son, Quincy, from the second, to Ulla Andersson; two daughters, Rashida and Kikada, of the third, of Peggy Lipton; and by a daughter, Kenya, from a relationship with Nastassja Kinski, and a daughter, Rachel, with Carol Reynolds.