OOver the course of 91 years, Quincy Jones has done pretty much everything you could do in the entertainment industry. He was a musician, arranger, composer, solo artist, record company executive, mogul, entrepreneur and producer, not just of music, but of films and TV – and, as noted in Chris Heath’s extraordinary, 2018 newspaper article Quincy Jones. Has a story about that, he knew everyone. “The Ghetto Gump,” as he called himself, referring to Forrest, was the thread that connected Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to Dr. Dre and the Weeknd; a musician who had performed with Elvis Presley and Amy Winehouse, Count Basie and Bono, Nat King Cole and Young Thug; the man who had a credit on Sinatra At the Sands and Harry Styles’ Harry’s House.

It is a resume unlike any other. How did he achieve that? He was clearly driven, perhaps as a result of a difficult childhood. Born on Chicago’s gang-ridden South Side during the Great Depression, Jones wandered into “the wrong neighborhood” at the age of seven, was stabbed through the hand with a switchblade and attacked with an ice pick. His mother had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Jones spent time with his grandmother in Kentucky in such poverty that he claimed they survived by eating rats. His father then moved the family to Washington and remarried a woman who Jones said was physically abusive.

Jones was also extremely talented, still in college when he was invited to quit to work with vibraphonist and former Benny Goodman sideman Lionel Hampton. Hampton had started his own orchestra, a big band agile enough to navigate the end of the swing era and follow in its footsteps the rise of bebop and rhythm and blues: an object lesson in open-mindedness and moving with the time you live in. suspects remained with Jones.

Certainly, when he moved to New York and began working as a freelance arranger, Jones’s approach was admirably Catholic: his client list ranged from big band greats, including Count Basie and Gene Krupa, to stars of jazz’s new wave – Clifford Brown and Cannonball. Among them Adderley – to rhythm and blues artist Big Maybelle, whose original version of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On Jones arranged and produced.

His ability to switch between genres perhaps brought with it a certain degree of pragmatism. By the late 1950s he had become an artist in his own right, leading bands with impressive musicians – one session for his second album with Charles Mingus, Milt Jackson, Art Farmer and Herbie Mann – but when he formed his own 18-piece big band in Europe in 1959, they achieved both critical acclaim and poverty. He decided to “learn the difference between music and the music business” and took a job at Mercury Records, where his breakthrough hit was Lesley Gore’s 1963 teen pop anthem It’s My Party, which was rushed to release a version of beat the same number. Spector had recorded with the Crystals.

On the one hand, you could see the adolescent soap opera of that record as at odds with the sophisticated and complex music Jones had released on his own recent albums. These included The Quintessence – home to an astonishing, breakneck version of Mingus’s Straight, No Chaser – and Big Band Bossa Nova, which opened with Jones’ evergreen composition Soul Bossa Nova, best known today as the theme to the Austin Powers films.

On the other hand, perhaps you could tell that they were the work of the same man: after all, beneath the campy melodrama of the lyrics, there was a distinctly Latin American flavor to the rhythm of It’s My Party, an elegance to the snappy horn. regulation. Furthermore, no one else in the music business moved with apparent ease between recording chart-topping teen pop singles, arranging and conducting the Count Basie Orchestra for a collaborative album with Frank Sinatra (1964’s It Might As Well Be Swing), releasing progressive jazz albums and pursuing a parallel career as a film composer.

The final aspect of Jones’ career began with the soundtrack for Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker, and culminated with his work on the 1967 neo-noir crime film In Cold Blood. He ignored both the objections of Columbia Pictures, which made Leonard Bernstein wanted, like the racism of Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, who wanted someone who was not black to deliver a series of sad, poignant and often atonal music that was widely appreciated. Oscar nomination – he was the first African-American composer to be shortlisted.

Meanwhile, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, his own albums began to lose their footing in straight jazz, offering instead a purist-frenzied cocktail of soul and funk with jazz harmonies and improvisation and atmospheric, faintly psychedelic orchestrations , which featured instrumental blues guitars. TV themes and stunning, lengthy edits of recent hits: 1971’s Smackwater Jack had its ten-minute version of What’s Going On? by Marvin Gaye, You’ve Got It Bad Girl from 1973 is a sublime reinterpretation of Summer In the City by Lovin’ Spoonful.

Their cast lists gradually filled out, as jazz musicians collaborated with star vocalists and crack session players: 1974’s Body Heat featured Herbie Hancock and Bob James alongside members of the Funk Brothers, Stevie Wonder-affiliated synth pioneers Tonto’s Expanding Headband, Billy Preston, Minnie Riperton and Al Jarreau. This approach reached a peak on Sounds… And Stuff Like That! in 1978. – home to the ultra-funky Stuff Like That, which featured Chaka Khan on vocals with Ashford and Simpson – and 1981’s platinum-selling, triple-Grammy-winning The Dude, which spawned a string of hit singles, including the fabulously sophisticated post-disco funk from Razzamatazz could be the choice.

By the time The Dude was released, Jones had begun his collaboration with Michael Jackson. They met while working together on The Wiz, an African-American retelling of The Wizard of Oz. The three albums they made together would change pop history, and while Jackson’s astonishing talent was unequivocally the star of the show, Jones’ fingerprints were all over the finished products.

It was Jones who brought in former Heatwave keyboardist Rod Temperton as a songwriter – he contributed six songs to Off The Wall and Thriller, including Rock With You, and the title tracks from both albums – and Jones who secured Vincent Price for a suitably creepy monologue. On Off The Wall you heard his jazz background seep into the sound of I Can’t Help It and She’s Out Of My Life (a song Jones originally intended for Frank Sinatra), and you noticed his unwillingness to be boxed in by genre in the decision to drop Girlfriend – a cover of a Paul McCartney-penned soft rock song from Wings’ poorly received album London Town – in the middle of what was ostensibly a disco album.

Thriller, meanwhile, contained a clear hint of Jones’ pragmatism. If Jackson wanted to become the biggest star in the world, as he claimed, then his album would have to have the widest possible appeal, hence the duet with Paul McCartney and Eddie Van Halen’s appearance on Beat It.

After his association with Michael Jackson came to an end with the 1987 release of Bad (there were later royalties disputes that ended up in court, Jones brazenly accused Jackson of stealing Billie Jean’s bassline from another of his productions, Donna Summer’s State of Independence), Jones continued to do extraordinary things: perhaps not on the scale of producing the best-selling album in the history of the music industry, but things you suspected only he could do.

Jones somehow convinced the ailing Miles Davis to do the one thing he had always refused to do and revisit the music from his classic collaborations with Gil Evans at the Montreux jazz festival a few weeks before his death in 1991. He was probably the only person who could record an album with a supporting cast that included Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Barry White and Ice-T. There were hugely successful diversions into TV and film production. When Chris Heath met him, Jones was 84 and said he had never been busier in his life: ten films, six albums, four Broadway shows, a TV biopic, a documentary, all in the works.

He accomplished so much that any kind of posthumous assessment feels like it’s just a superficial assessment. Maybe it’s just best to say that Quincy Jones could – and did – it all. It is difficult to imagine a more striking epitaph for any artist.