Legendary producer, songwriter, composer, and musician Quincy Jones died at his home in Bel Air, California on Sunday, . He was 91. Jones’ publicist Arnold Robinson confirmed that the producer “passed away peacefully” at home. No cause of death was revealed.
“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” read a statement by Jones’ family. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”
In a career spanning more than 70 years, Jones became one of the most influential figures in music, first as a musician throughout the 1950s, then as a composer, arranger, and producer in the ’60s as well as a record producer, television and film producer, and songwriter. Jones was nominated for 80 Grammy Awards and won 28 of them, along with a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.
Born March 14, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois, Jones started his career as a jazz trumpeter, eventually working his way into Dizzy Gillespie’s band in 1956. As he fine-tuned his skills as an arranger, composer, and producer, Jones began working with artists like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Ray Charles by the late ’50s. In 1955, Jones also set the original arrangement of Big Maybelle’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” before it became a hit by Jerry Lee Lewis three years later.
During the 1960s, Jones scored his first film score with The Pawnbroker in 1965 and went on to work on the 1967 Sidney Poitier classic In the Heat of the Night and the Richard Brooks-helmed, Truman Capote-inspired In Cold Blood, and more as well as moving into television production.
Jones later crossed over from being a musician and was in greater demand as a songwriter and producer working with some of the biggest artists in pop, jazz, soul, and funk, while producing everyone from Lesley Gore and her two biggest hits “You Don’t Own Me” and “It’s My Party” and Gillespie’s 1963 album New Wave!