Quincy Jones, the famed music producer who helped artists dominate popular music for half a century, has died. His publicist says he passed away peacefully at his home in California. He was 91 years old.
NPR's Walter Ray Watson described Jones' talent as one that produced music that hooked ears, warmed hearts and moved feet to dance. Along with Michael Jackson, he broke open the pop music world with production on songs like Bad, Billie Jean , and Rock with You . His contributions had more than a hundred million records sold, including Thriller , the best selling album of all time.
It might be hard to imagine now, but record execs doubted whether Quincy Jones was the right fit to produce Michael Jackson's debut as a solo adult artist. An unlikely success story Born Quincy Delight Jones Jr., he was the son of a Chicago carpenter and a housewife mother, who sang church songs at home.
Jones faced gang violence as a child of the Great Depression. And at age 10, his family moved to Seattle, where his dad joined the war effort, working in a shipyard. "Gangsters.
Lot of them are gangsters. Back in the thirties, it was all I ever saw with machine guns," was how he described his Chicago neighborhood growing up in a 2008 interview with NPR's Michele Norris. As a kid, he was a ringleader of mischief.
And one day with a bunch of boys, he targeted a roomful of freshly baked pies at a rec center. They broke in, ate all the pies. Then Jones opened a door.
"And I saw - in the shadows, I saw a.