Quincy Jones

About Quincy Jones

Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American music impresario, conductor, record producer, musical arranger, Academy Award-winning film composer and trumpeter. During five decades in the entertainment industry, Jones has earned a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991. He is best known as the producer of the album Thriller, by pop icon Michael Jackson, which sold 104 million copies worldwide, and as the producer and conductor of the charity song “We Are the World”.

In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African-Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Song category. That same year, he became the first African-American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of In Cold Blood. Jones was also the first (and so far, the only) African-American to be nominated as a producer in the category of Best Picture (in 1986, for The Color Purple). He was also the first African-American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African-American, each of them having seven nominations. At the 2008 BET Awards Quincy Jones was presented with the Humanitarian Award, this award was presented to him for all the work and service he has given to the world throughout his life.

Jones was born in Chicago, Illinois, the eldest son of Sarah Frances (née Wells), an apartment complex manager and bank executive who suffered from schizophrenia, and Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter. His mother is a descendant of Mary Belle Lanier, the out of wedlock daughter of James Balance Lanier (second cousin four times removed of George Washington and first cousin of the maternal grandfather of John McCain) by an unknown African American woman. Jones is also of, Welsh, and West African/Central African ancestry (for the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives he had his DNA tested; the test showed him to be of Tikar descent). Jones discovered music in grade school and took up the trumpet. When he was 10, his family moved to Seattle, Washington; there he attended Garfield High School.