US music titan Quincy Jones dies at 91

Quincy Jones, the US music titan who worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and countless other artists, has died at the age of 91.

Jones' publicist, Arnold Robinson, says he died on Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

There was very little Jones did not do in a music career of more than 65 years. He was a trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, composer, producer and winner of 27 Grammy Awards.

A studio workaholic and a virtuoso at handling delicate egos, he shaped recordings by jazz greats such as Miles Davis, produced Sinatra, and put together the superstar ensemble that recorded the 1985 fund-raiser We Are the World, the biggest hit song of its time.

Jones also was a prolific writer of movie scores and co-produced the film The Color Purple, as well as the 1990s television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which launched the career of Will Smith.

Jones' circle of friends included some of the best known figures of the 20th century. He dined with Pablo Picasso, met Pope John Paul II, helped Nelson Mandela celebrate his 90th birthday and once retreated to Marlon Brando's South Pacific island to recover from a breakdown.

Everything he did was stamped with his universal and undeniable hipness. U2 frontman Bono called Jones "the coolest person I've ever met".

Jones' most lasting achievements were in collaboration with Jackson. They made three landmark albums - Off the Wall in 1979, Thriller in 1982, and Bad in 1987 - that changed the landscape of American popular music. Thriller sold as many as 70 million copies, with six of the nine songs on the album becoming top 10 singles.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born March 14, 1933, in Chicago. As a boy, he aspired to be a gangster like those he saw in his rough neighbourhood. He was seven when his mother was taken to a mental institution. His father, a carpenter, remarried and moved the family to Bremerton in Washington state, where young Quincy pursued a life of petty crime.

Jones said his interest in music bloomed in Bremerton, when he and some friends found a piano after sneaking into the community centre in the segregated wartime housing project where they lived.

In Seattle at age 14, Jones met 16-year-old Ray Charles, not yet famous, who taught him to arrange and compose music. Basie and trumpeter Clark Terry also would be mentors to the young Jones and he won a scholarship to what would become the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He gave it up, however, to go on the road with Lionel Hampton's band as a teenage trumpet player in the early 1950s.

"Music was the one thing I could control," Jones wrote in his autobiography. "It was the one world that offered me freedom ... I didn't have to search for answers. The answers lay no further than the bell of my trumpet and my scrawled, pencilled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant and cool."

In the late 1950s he went on US government-sponsored tours around the world with a band organised by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Jones then led his own band through Europe. He was deeply in debt in the early 1960s when he took a job at Mercury Records in New York, becoming one of the first Black executives at a white-owned record company.

There, Jones ventured out of the jazz genre and produced his first hit single, It's My Party, a Lesley Gore song that topped the US pop chart in 1964.

At Mercury, Jones got his first movie-scoring job, Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker. He went on to score nearly 40 films, including In the Heat of the Night, In Cold Blood, Mackenna's Gold, The Wiz and part of the television mini-series Roots.

The people Jones worked with would populate a jazz or R&B hall of fame - Basie, Gillespie, Tommy Dorsey, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin. But he also produced in other genres with, among others, Paul Simon, Amy Winehouse, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer.

He arranged Sinatra's hit Fly Me to the Moon that astronaut Buzz Aldrin played a cassette recording of during the first moon landing in 1969. Years later, Jones told GQ magazine that Sinatra "called me up, and he was like a little kid: 'We got the first music on the moon, man!'"

Jones' work with Jackson was historic, although Jackson's record company initially thought Jones was too jazzy to be his producer. Their 1982 collaboration, Thriller, became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s.

Jones wanted to broaden Jackson's fan base so they added rock elements, getting guitarist Eddie Van Halen to play a blistering solo on Beat It, which became one of Jackson's biggest hits ever. Complemented by dazzling videos featuring Jackson's mesmerising dancing just as MTV was coming of age, Thriller made the entertainer one of the biggest stars in the world.

In 1985, Jones, Jackson and Lionel Richie organised We Are the World, a record to raise money for fighting famine in Ethiopia. The huge all-star chorus featured Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen and Smokey Robinson.

Jones was married three times. His first wife was his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell with whom he had one daughter; his second wife was Swedish model Ulla Andersson with whom he had two children, including Quincy III, who became a hip-hop producer.

His third wife was Mod Squad actress Peggy Lipton, with whom he had two daughters, including actress Rashida Jones. He had two other children outside his marriages, including one with actress Nastassja Kinski.

with Reuters