He produced Michael Jackson’s smash report “Thriller,” in addition to Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “The Color Purple” and the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — initiatives that helped bolster his legacy as a hit-maker and media mogul.
Jones obtained quite a few awards and accolades, together with recognition on the John F. Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2010 and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2021, he joined James Brown and Otis Redding as one of many first three “foundational inductees” of the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame in Atlanta.
“As a grasp inventor of musical hybrids, he has combined pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African, and Brazilian music into many dazzling fusions, traversing nearly each medium, together with information, reside performances, films and tv,” Obama stated in his remarks.
Jones gained 28 Grammys, placing him second on the listing of all-time winners. He nabbed an Emmy in 1977 for writing the theme for the primary episode of the miniseries “Roots” and later obtained the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on the Oscars in 1994.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933, the son of Quincy Delight Jones, a semiprofessional baseball participant and carpenter, and Sarah Frances, a financial institution officer and condo complicated supervisor.
Jones was first uncovered to music by his mom, who sang non secular songs. She later suffered a schizophrenic breakdown; Jones’ mother and father finally divorced, and his father remarried.
In the early Forties, Jones and his household relocated to Bremerton, Washington, the place he studied the trumpet and labored with a fledgling pianist/singer by the title of Ray Charles, who was stated to have helped persuade Jones to pursue his curiosity within the musical arts.
Jones studied briefly on the eminent Schillinger House (now referred to as the Berklee College of Music) in Boston within the Fifties. He then began touring with the jazz nice Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger.