How Quincy Jones made Michael Jackson a superstar and had 22 different women on the go aged 80
IF Jacko had the moves and the grooves, Quincy Jones was the visionary producer who made Thriller extra-thrilling.
Not only did he produce the biggest-selling pop album in history but he was an entrepreneurial showbiz titan for seven decades.
Quincy, known to friends simply as Q, was also a self-confessed womaniser who admitted in his mid-eighties that he still had 22 girlfriends on the go, dotted around the world and all at least half his age.
He raised eyebrows during a year-long dalliance with a 19-year-old Egyptian designer, Heba Elawadi, when he was 73.
He was also an activist who supported Martin Luther “I have a dream” King in the Sixties and later worked with U2 singer Bono on philanthropic causes.
But he is best remembered for being the doyen of his music- producing craft — and his death at 91 signals the passing of the one they all looked up to.
He worked with the jazz greats, Frank Sinatra among them, guided soul queens Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin and even played trumpet for Elvis Presley.
He was introduced to heroin by Ray Charles but quit after five months and once shared a private jet with Sinatra and six Playboy bunnies.
Quincy admitted that “Frank was always trying to hook me up with Marilyn Monroe” but nothing ever came of it.
Outside work, his life was marked by two seismic events that had potentially fatal consequences.
He narrowly escaped the clutches of Charles Manson’s cult in 1969, having planned to go to Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the gruesome murders. (He forgot about the invitation.)
In 1974, he survived a brain aneurysm which prevented him from playing his beloved trumpet again, in case the strain led to a further health crisis.
In his wildly successful career, Quincy was not one to stand still but moved with the times, producing Michael Jackson’s big three albums Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad.
He gave his services to disco sensation Donna Summer and turned his hand to funk, a notable example being George Benson’s dancefloor-primed Give Me The Night.
Much later, he worked with Amy Winehouse, having met her at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in London.
They recorded his It’s My Party, originally a hit for Lesley Gore, prompting Quincy to call Amy “a smart girl” and “a sweetheart”, and to announce that she had “brought the song home”.
“She has a great voice. She’s from another planet,” he enthused.
But this media mogul went way beyond music production — and the inevitable partying that comes with phenomenal success in the entertainment world.
He helmed a successful TV/film production company and helped turn Will Smith into a superstar by launching The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.
He composed the soundtrack to more than 50 films and TV shows, including the 1969 crime caper, The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine.
Also 91 and born on the same day as Quincy (March 14, 1933), Caine was among the first to pay tribute.
“My celestial twin was a titan in the musical world,” he wrote on social media.
“He was a wonderful and unique human being — lucky to have known him.”
‘ONE OF A KIND’
Only Beyonce and Jay-Z, both on 88 Grammy nominations, and Paul McCartney with 81, have had more than Quincy’s 80.
He converted 28 into trophies.
He was one of a select few to earn the coveted EGOT clean sweep . . . Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony . . . alongside the likes of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Whoopi Goldberg and Elton John.
Elton also took time out yesterday to say: “Nobody had a career as incredible.
“He played with the best and he produced the best.
“What a guy. Loved him.”
Goldberg, Oscar-winning star of The Color Purple, produced by Quincy, described him as “one of a kind”.
It was Quincy who brought together 46 singers (and egos) to record We Are The World in 1985 for America’s answer to Do They Know It’s Christmas, in response to the famine in Ethiopia.
Only he could call Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan and the rest and get a positive response.
Married three times, the father of seven children by five different women, Quincy had a string of glamorous partners.
With second wife, the actress Peggy Lipton, he had two daughters who both followed their mother into acting, Kidada and Rashida.
Rashida is best known for portraying Karen Filippelli in the American version of The Office.
Between 1991 and 1995, he was in a relationship with German actress Nastassja Kinski, with whom he had a fashion model daughter, Kenya.
Quincy’s final Instagram post appeared on Sunday, hours before he died, and it was to wish one of his other daughters, Martina, a happy birthday.
Accompanied by a photograph of the two wreathed in smiles, it said: ‘Happy Birthday to my Tina Beena!
“So proud to be yo papa!
“Big hug, I love you eternally.”
Then yesterday came the news that Quincy had “passed away peacefully” at his mansion in Bel-Air, the swish Los Angeles neighbourhood.
His family came together to release this statement: “Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing.
“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.”
Quincy Delight Jr. was born in the home of the Blues, Chicago, to a half-white father with Welsh blood, also called Quincy, a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Kentucky.
His mother, Sarah, was a bank worker and apartment block manager.
He discovered both his parents had ancestors who had been slaves.
Quincy came into the world not long after Al Capone ruled the roost in Chicago and, as a youngster, thought he too might be drawn into a life of organised crime.
At seven, he had his hand nailed to a fence and an ice pick embedded in his head because he ventured into the wrong neighbourhood and “didn’t know the codes”.
Instead, he achieved the “comfortable life” he dreamed of by turning his passion for music into an epic career.
At school, he developed skills as a trumpeter and arranger and, at 14, he met one of the inspirations of his life, the blind singer Ray Charles, himself then only 16.
‘MUSIC AND BUSINESS’
He noted that Charles overcame his blindness to achieve success in music and he also drew strength from his father’s strong work ethic.
Despite earning a scholarship to Seattle University in 1951, music proved a greater attraction.
He toured with bandleader Lionel Hampton and, on moving to New York, began writing material for Ray Charles, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, among others.
Then he began releasing his own albums but, at quite an early age, super-smart Quincy had a lightbulb moment.
He later said: “I was in the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving.
“That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business.
“If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”
In 1958, he began hooking up with Ol’ Blue Eyes himself.
He was hired to conduct and arrange for Sinatra by none other than Grace Kelly, actress and princess consort of Monaco.
Quincy continued working on a various of projects with The Chairman Of The Board all the way through to the singer’s final album, LA is My Lady, in 1984.
His arrangement of Fly Me To The Moon, by Sinatra and Count Basie, was the first song to be played on the moon — by Buzz Aldrin in 1969.
In the Sixties, with many other high profile clients and collab- orators, Quincy’s star had been inexorably on the rise.
Having become the first African-American to become a vice- president of major label Mercury Records, he began composing film scores, including for the Oscar- winning In The Heat Of The Night starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.
But Quincy’s biggest success was to come with Michael Jackson, who he helped turn into the King Of Pop.
Jacko had already been a serious hit-maker with The Jackson 5 when the producer took him under his wing.
They met when both their services were employed for the 1978 Hollywood musical The Wiz and clearly hit it off.
Jackson asked Quincy to recommend a producer for his upcoming solo album and, after some deliberation, suggested that he would like to handle the job himself.
The resulting record Off The Wall, featuring Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough and She’s Out Of My Life, was a masterclass in disco, funk, R&B, with a nod to Broadway musicals, and sold more than 20million copies.
It paved the way for the biggest album of all time, Thriller. Official estimates put sales at 65million but, in the era of streaming, that figure is likely to be way higher.
Thriller bears the monster hits Beat It, Billie Jean, The Girl Is Mine, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ and the title track, with its ghoulish zombie video starring horror legend Vincent Price.
The album is loaded with sublime production flourishes that cemented Quincy’s genius — such as heavy metal guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s crunching riffs on Beat It.
After Thriller, the producer kept pace with the fast-moving Jackson by helping offer up the sonic masterpiece that is Bad, with its notable songs Smooth Criminal, Man In The Mirror, The Way You Make Me Feel and the title track.
When Jacko died in 2009, Quincy said: “For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don’t have the words.
“To this day, the music we created together on Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad is played in every corner of the world
“I’ve lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him.”
Now the world has lost Quincy Jones . . . truly “one of a kind”.
What a life.