Quincy Delight Jones was born in Chicago, Illinois, the eldest son of Sarah Frances (aka 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.
In 1951, Jones won a scholarship to the Schillinger House in Boston. However, he abandoned his studies when he received an offer to tour as a trumpeter with the bandleader Lionel Hampton. While Jones was on the road with Hampton, he displayed a gift for arranging songs. Jones relocated to New York City, where he received a number of freelance commissions arranging songs for artists like Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and his old friend Ray Charles.
Jones is recognised as a 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’.
Jones first worked with Frank Sinatra when he was invited by Princess Grace to arrange a benefit at the Monaco Sporting Club in 1958. Six years later, Sinatra hired him to arrange and conduct Sinatra’s second album with Count Basie, It Might as Well Be Swing (1964). Jones conducted and arranged 1966’s live album with the Basie Band, Sinatra at the Sands. Jones was also the arranger/conductor when Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson performed with the Basie orchestra in St. Louis in a benefit for Dismas House in June 1965. The fund-raiser was broadcast to a number of other theaters around the country and eventually released on DVD. Later that year, Jones was also the arranger/conductor when Sinatra and Basie appeared on “The Hollywood Palace” TV show on October 16, 1965. Nineteen years later, Sinatra and Jones teamed up for 1984’s L.A. Is My Lady, after a joint Sinatra-Lena Horne project was abandoned.
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.
