Post by Admin on Mar 18, 2020 11:18:14 GMT -4
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer.[2] His career spans over 60 years in the entertainment industry with a record 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.
Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor, before moving on to work in pop music and film scores. In 1969 Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African-Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, for "The Eyes of Love" from the film Banning. Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African-American to be nominated twice in the same year. In 1971 he became the first African-American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. In 1995 he was the first African-American to receive the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He has tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the second most Oscar-nominated African-American, with seven nominations each.
Jones was the producer, with Michael Jackson, of Jackson's albums Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987), as well as the producer and conductor of the 1985 charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.[4] In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as the winner, alongside Lou Adler, of the Ahmet Ertegun Award. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time magazine.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the son of Sarah Frances (née Wells), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones Sr., a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Kentucky. Jones' paternal grandmother was an ex-slave in Louisville,and Jones would later discover that his paternal grandfather was Welsh. With the help of the author Alex Haley in 1972 and Mormon researchers in Salt Lake City, Jones discovered that his mother's ancestors included James Lanier, a relative of poet Sidney Lanier. Jones said, "He had a baby with my great-grandmother , and my grandmother was born there [on a plantation in Kentucky]. We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams."[6] Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them.
For the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives, Jones had his DNA tested, and genealogists researched his family history again. His DNA revealed he is mostly African but is also 34% European in ancestry, on both sides of his family. Research showed that he has English, French, Italian, and Welsh ancestry through his father. His mother's side is of West and Central African descent, specifically the Tikar people of Cameroon. His mother also had European ancestry, such as Lanier male ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, making him eligible for Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his ancestors is Betty Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington. Jones is also a direct descendant of Edward I of England, whose ancestors included French, Polish, Rurik, Scottish, and Swiss nobility.
Jones' family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Jones had a younger brother, Lloyd, who was an engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV until his death 1998. Jones was introduced to music by his mother, who always sang religious songs, and by his next-door neighbor, Lucy Jackson. When Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, and he would listen through the walls. Lucy recalled that after he heard her one-day, she could not get him off her piano.
When Jones was young, his mother suffered from a schizophrenic breakdown and was admitted to a mental institution. His father divorced his mother and married Elvera Jones, who already had three children of her own named Waymond, Theresa, and Katherine. Elvera and Quincy Sr. later had three children together: Jeanette, Margie, and future U.S. District Judge Richard. In 1943 Jones and his family moved to Bremerton, Washington, where his father got a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. After the war, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School. In high school, he developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger. His classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle's first society jazz band leaders. Jones and Taylor began playing music together, and at the age of 14 they played with a National Reserve band. Jones has said he got much more experience with music growing up in a smaller city because he otherwise would have faced too much competition.
At age 14, Jones introduced himself to 16-year-old Ray Charles after watching him play at the Black Elks Club. Jones cites Charles as an early inspiration for his own music career, noting that Charles overcame a disability (blindness) to achieve his musical goals. He has credited his father's sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed and his loving strength with holding the family together. Jones has said his father had a rhyming motto: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all." In 1951, Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University, where a young Clint Eastwood—also a music major—watched him play in the college band. After one semester, Jones transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship. While studying at Berklee, he played at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important musical influences. He left his studies after receiving an offer to tour as a trumpeter, arranger, and pianist with the bandleader Lionel Hampton and embarked on his professional career. On the road with Hampton, he displayed a gift for arranging songs. He moved to New York City, where he received freelance commissions writing arrangements for Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and Ray Charles, who was by then a close friend.
At the age of 19, Jones traveled with jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton to Europe. He said the tour altered his view of racism in the United States:
“ It gave you some sense of perspective on past, present, and future. It took the myopic conflict between just black and white in the United States and put it on another level because you saw the turmoil between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Cypriots and the Greeks, and the Swedes and the Danes, and the Koreans and the Japanese. Everybody had these hassles, and you saw it was a basic part of human nature, these conflicts. It opened my soul, it opened my mind. ”
In early 1956 Jones accepted a temporary job at the CBS Stage Show hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey that was broadcast live from the Studio 50 in New York City. On January 28, February 4, 11 and 18, as well as on March 17 and 24, Jones played second trumpet in the studio band that supported 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his first six television appearances. Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel", which became his first No. 1 record and the Billboard magazine Pop Record of the year. Soon after, as trumpeter and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, Jones went on tour of the Middle East and South America sponsored by the United States Information Agency. After returning, he signed a contract with ABC-Paramount and started his recording career as the leader of his band. In 1957 he settled in Paris, where he studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and performed at the Paris Olympia. He became music director at Barclay, a French record company and the licensee for Mercury in France.
During the 1950s Jones toured Europe with a number of jazz orchestras. As musical director of Harold Arlen's jazz musical Free and Easy, he took to the road again. A European tour closed in Paris in February 1960. With musicians from the Arlen show, he formed his big band "The Jones Boys" with eighteen musicians. The band included double bass player Eddie Jones and trumpeter Reunald Jones (none of the three were related). The band toured North America and Europe and the concerts met enthusiastic audiences and sparkling reviews, but the earnings failed to support a band of this size. Poor budget planning resulted in an economic disaster; the band dissolved, leaving Jones in a financial crisis.
"We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That's when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two."
Irving Green, head of Mercury, helped Jones with a personal loan and a job as musical director of the company's New York division. He worked with Doug Moody, founder of Mystic Records.
Work with Michael Jackson
Jones worked with Michael Jackson as a producer on Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987).
While working on the film The Wiz, Michael Jackson asked Jones to recommend some producers for his upcoming solo album. Jones offered some names but eventually offered to produce the record himself. Jackson accepted and the resulting record, Off the Wall, sold about 20 million copies. This made Jones the most powerful record producer in the industry at that time. Jones and Jackson's next collaboration, Thriller, sold 60 million copies and became the highest-selling album of all time. The rise of MTV and the advent of music videos as promotional tools also contributed to Thriller's sales. Jones worked on Jackson's album Bad, which has sold 45 million copies. Bad was the last time the two men worked together in the studio. Audio interviews with Jones are included in the 2001 special editions of Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.
In a 2002 interview, when asked if he would work with Jones again, Jackson suggested he might. But in 2007, when Jones was asked by NME, he said, "Man, please! We already did that. I have talked to him about working with him again but I've got too much to do. I've got 900 products, I'm 74 years old."
Following Jackson's death on June 25, 2009, Jones said:
I am absolutely devastated at this tragic and unexpected news. For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don't have the words. Divinity brought our souls together on The Wiz and allowed us to do what we were able to throughout the '80s. To this day, the music we created together on Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad is played in every corner of the world and the reason for that is because he had it all ... talent, grace, professionalism and dedication. He was the consummate entertainer and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him.
In October 2013 the BBC and The Hollywood Reporter said Jones planned to sue Michael Jackson's estate for $10 million. Jones said that MJJ Productions, a song company managed by Jackson's estate and Sony Music Entertainment, improperly re-edited songs to deprive him of royalties and production fees and breached an agreement giving him the right to remix master recordings for albums released after Jackson's death. The songs Jones produced for Jackson were used in the film This Is It. Jones was reported to be filing the suits against Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil productions and the 25th-anniversary edition of the Bad album.[38] He believed he should have received a producer credit in the film.
Work with Frank Sinatra
Quincy Jones first worked with Frank Sinatra in 1958 when invited by Princess Grace to arrange a benefit concert at the Monaco Sporting Club. Six years later, Sinatra hired him to arrange and conduct Sinatra's second album with Count Basie, It Might as Well Be Swing (1964). Jones conducted and arranged the singer's live album with the Basie Band, Sinatra at the Sands (1966). Jones was also the arranger/conductor when Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson performed with the Basie orchestra in June 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri, in a benefit for Dismas House. The fund-raiser was broadcast to movie theaters around the country and eventually released on VHS. Later that year, Jones was the arranger/conductor when Sinatra and Basie appeared on The Hollywood Palace TV show on October 16, 1965. Nineteen years later, Sinatra and Jones teamed up for 1984's L.A. Is My Lady. Jones said,
“ Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring. ”
Brazilian culture
The Brazilian Simone, whom Jones cites as "one of the world's greatest singers"; Brazilian musicians Ivan Lins[48] and Milton Nascimento; and percussionist Paulinho Da Costa, who Jones called "one of the best in the business", have become close friends and partners in his recent works.
Jones's social activism began in the 1960s with his support of Martin Luther King Jr. Jones is one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music (IBAM), whose events aim to raise enough funds for the creation of a national library of African-American art and music. Jones is also one of the founders of the Black Arts Festival in his hometown of Chicago. In the 1970s Jones formed The Quincy Jones Workshops. Meeting at the Los Angeles Landmark Variety Arts Center, the workshops educated and honed the skills of inner-city youth in musicianship, acting, and songwriting. Among its alumni were Alton McClain who had a hit song with Alton McClain and Destiny, and Mark Wilkins, who co-wrote the hit song "Havin' a Love Attack" with Mandrill and became National Promotion Director for Mystic Records.
For many years, Jones has worked closely with Bono of U2 on a number of philanthropic endeavors. He is the founder of the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation,[4] a nonprofit organization that built more than 100 homes in South Africa and which aims to connect youths with technology, education, culture, and music.[57] One of the organization's programs is an intercultural exchange between underprivileged youths from Los Angeles and South Africa. In 2004 Jones helped launch the We Are the Future (WAF) project, which gives children in poor and conflict-ridden areas a chance to live their childhoods and develop a sense of hope. The program is the result of a strategic partnership between the Global Forum, the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, and Hani Masri, with the support of the World Bank, UN agencies and major companies. The project was launched with a concert in Rome, Italy, in front of an audience of half a million people.[58]
Jones supports a number of other charities, including the NAACP, GLAAD, Peace Games, AmfAR, and the Maybach Foundation.[59] He serves on the Advisory Board of HealthCorps. On July 26, 2007, he announced his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. But with the election of Barack Obama, Quincy Jones said that his next conversation "with President Obama [will be] to beg for a secretary of arts."[60] This prompted the circulation of a petition on the internet asking Obama to create such a Cabinet-level position in his administration.[61][62] In 2001, Jones became an honorary member of the board of directors of the Jazz Foundation of America. He has worked with the foundation to save the homes and lives of America's elderly jazz and blues musicians, including those who survived Hurricane Katrina.[63] Jones and his friend John Sie, founder of Liberty Starz, started the Global Down Syndrome Foundation.[64] They were inspired by Sie's granddaughter, Sophia, who has Down
