National Endowment for the Arts Statement on the Death of NEA Jazz Master and National Medal of Arts Recipient Quincy Jones

It is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the passing of Quincy Jones, recipient of a 2008 NEA Jazz Masters fellowship and 2010 National Medal of Arts. He distinguished himself in nearly every aspect of music, including as a bandleader, record producer, composer and arranger, trumpeter, and record label executive. He worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Count Basie to Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson.

Born in Chicago in 1933, Jones was brought up in Seattle. He began learning the trumpet as a teenager. He moved to New York City in the early 1950s, finding work as an arranger and musician with Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Lionel Hampton. In 1956, Dizzy Gillespie chose Jones to play in his big band, later having him put together a band and act as musical director on Gillespie's U.S. State Department tours of South America and the Middle East. The experience honed Jones' skills at leading a jazz orchestra. Jones moved to Paris, France, in 1957, and studied music theory with the renowned Nadia Boulanger, and he put together a jazz orchestra that toured throughout Europe and North America. Though critically acclaimed, the tour did not make money, and Jones disbanded the orchestra.

The time in Europe was fruitful for Jones though. He noted in an interview with the NEA in 2008, “I went to Paris and Paris was on fire, you know? I mean, God, it was ridiculous. There was respect. I was learning. I was working with Nadia Boulanger, studying, and getting a chance that I couldn't get in America to write for strings and big orchestras. They'd hire me for horns, but never for strings and all, because they didn't think Black musicians could write for strings.”

He became music director for Mercury Records in 1960, rising to vice president four years later. Also in 1964, he composed his first film score for Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker. After the success of that film, he left Mercury Records for Los Angeles to pursue what became a highly successful career as a film score composer. He wrote scores for more than 35 films, including In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, and The Italian Job.

In addition to his film scoring, he also continued to produce and arrange sessions in the 1960s, notably for Frank Sinatra on his albums with Count Basie, It Might As Well Be Swing in 1964 and Sinatra at the Sands in 1966. He later produced Sinatra's L.A. Is My Lady album in 1984.

Returning to the studio with his own work, he recorded a series of Grammy Award-winning albums between 1969 and 1981, including Walking in Space and You've Got It Bad, Girl. Following recovery from a near-fatal cerebral aneurysm in 1974, he focused on producing albums, most successfully with Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller, and the "We Are the World" sessions to raise money for the victims of Ethiopia's famine in 1985. In 1991, he coaxed Miles Davis into revisiting his 1950s orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival, conducting the orchestra for Davis' last concert. 

Jones holds the record for the most Grammy Award nominations at 80, of which he won 28, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. Jones was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government, in 2010 by President Obama.

Jones' career touched many musical genres and scores of musicians over his lifetime. “I just wanted to be around great musicians because that's the way you learn, to be around guys that really know what they're doing,” he said in the NEA interview. “I stood watch and paid attention, and shut up and listened.”