Quincy Jones born 14 March 1933

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (born March 14, 1933) also known as Q, is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. 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.

Famed producer Quincy Jones was born in Chicago, Illinois and reared in Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked locally with the then-unknown pianist-singer Ray Charles. In the early 1950s Jones studied briefly at the prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston. A multifaceted jazz and pop figure, his career began when he played trumpet and arranged for Lionel Hampton (1951-1953).

Jones then worked as a freelance arranger on many jazz sessions. working with Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and many others. He served as musical director for Dizzy Gillespie's overseas big-band tour (1956) and recorded his first album as a leader in the same year. He worked for Barclay Records in Paris (1957-1958) and led an all-star big band for the European production of Harold Arlen's blues opera, "Free and Easy" (1959) and continued to compose. Some of his more successful compositions from this period include “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “For Lena and Lennie,” “Jessica’s Day,”and “ Choo Choo Ch’boogie”.

                           

After returning to New York in 1961, Jones became an A&R director for Mercury Records. In 1964 he was named a vice president at Mercury, thereby becoming one of the first African Americans to hold a top executive position at a major American 

record label. He composed and arranged for Count Basie, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan and produced his own increasingly pop-oriented records and composed music for several films, including The Pawnbroker (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and In Cold Blood (1967), eventually producing over 50 scores and serving as a trailblazing African American musician in the Hollywood arena.

Jones next worked for the A&M label from 1969 to 1981 (with a brief hiatus as he recovered from a brain aneurysm in 1974) and moved increasingly away from jazz toward pop music. In 1975, Jones founded Qwest Productions, for which he arranged and produced hugely successful albums by Frank Sinatra and other major pop figures. In 1978, he produced the soundtrack for the musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. In 1982, Jones produced Jackson's all-time best-selling album Thriller.

In 1985, Jones used his clout among major American recording artists to record the much-celebrated anthem "We Are the World" to raise money for victims of famine in Ethiopia. His work on behalf of social causes has spanned his career, including the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, which built more than 100 homes in South Africa in 2001. The charity aims to connect youths with technology, education, culture and music and sponsors an intercultural exchange between teens in Los Angeles and South Africa.

Jones produced the 1985 film The Colour Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, as well as the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-1996), starring Will Smith. He also published the magazines Vibe and SPIN, and in 1990 he formed Quincy Jones Entertainment (QJE), a co-venture with Time Warner Inc. Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001.

Throughout the years, Jones worked with a “who’s who” of figures from all fields of popular music. He was nominated for more than 75 Grammy Awards (winning more than 25) and seven Academy Awards and received an Emmy Award for the theme music he wrote for the television miniseries Roots (1977). Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time magazine. In 2013 Jones was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In August 2016, he and his music were featured at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, London. The documentary Quincy (2018) chronicled his life and career and was directed by his daughter, actress and screenwriter Rashida Jones, and filmmaker Alan Hicks.

Jones has been married three times. His first marriage was to Jeri Caldwell from 1957 to 1966; they had one daughter together named Jolie. Jones was then married to Ulla Andersson, with whom he shares a son, Quincy, and a daughter, Martina, from 1967 to 1974. Jones' final marriage was to actress Peggy Lipton. The pair were married from 1974 to 1990, and they have two daughters, Rashida and Kidada. He also has two daughters from other relationships.

(Edited mainly from biography.com and Britannica.com)