Quincy Jones, celebrated music producer to stars, dies at 91

The multi-Grammy-winning musician and composer died peacefully late Sunday at his Bel-Air home, surrounded by family, his publicist, Arnold Robinson, said.

“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing," his family said in a statement. “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."

Jones produced the late pop star Michael Jackson’s albums “Off the Wall," “Bad" and “Thriller," the second-best-selling album of all time, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. He forged his connection with Jackson after helping produce the music for “The Wiz," the Broadway adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz" that starred the pop singer and singer Diana Ross. Jones also devoted much of his life to social causes, pioneering a model of celebrity activism when he produced the song “We Are the World" in 1985, conducting 46 big-name artists to perform it to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief.

In 2004, he organized a similar concert to raise money for his “We Are the Future" youth programs throughout Africa, his sense of humanitarian duty first triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d met in his 20s.

A hundred years from now, the “wonder will be that one man could have fit so much music into one lifetime," wrote Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2, in his introduction to Jones’s 2008 memoir called “The Complete Quincy Jones."

The Irish star traveled to Rome with Jones to meet Pope John Paul II in 1999 for a global debt-relief campaign. He recalled that while he felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the meeting, Jones was more impressed by the frail pope’s stylish footwear, whispering to Bono: “Check…out…the shoes."

“The intense warmth of the man himself offered a new kind of sexiness to the way a music mogul could carry himself," Bono wrote.

Jones was born in Chicago and was raised primarily by his father, a carpenter, who struggled to put food on the table. Jones and his siblings sometimes ate rats fried by their grandmother, chewed tar instead of gum and once sated their hunger by eating a pack of cough drops, according to his autobiography.

Jones drew musical inspiration from his mother, who sang religious songs around the house, but she suffered from schizophrenia and was put in a mental institution when he was seven.

Jones became obsessed with all forms of music from an early age, poring over music instruction books and briefly taking a job at a brothel located beneath a juke joint to soak in the tunes. His family moved to Seattle when he was 10, and it was there he picked up piano, followed soon by the tuba, sousaphone, trumpet, trombone and other horns, so that he could march at the front of the school band.

At the age of 14 he became fast friends with Ray Charles. The blind soul musician would give Jones piano lessons in the dark, fry him chicken and introduce him to the concept of orchestration.

He studied for short stints on scholarship at Seattle University, where fellow student Clint Eastwood recalled him as a “chick magnet," and at what is now known as Boston’s Berklee College of Music. But Jones quickly gravitated to the New York City jazz scene, where his mentors included bebop greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

He scraped by financially for years while touring with prominent jazz orchestras before taking a job as an executive at Mercury Records. He began composing film scores with 1964’s “The Pawnbroker." He continued scoring films and TV shows for decades, including “The Cosby Show," Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple" and “The Italian Job." He was executive producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," for which his son, Quincy Jones III, also composed some of the theme music.

All the while he continued composing his own hits such as 1962’s bubbly “Soul Bossa Nova," which got a second wind in the Austin Powers films, and arranging music for the likes of Frank Sinatra. U2’s Bono credited Jones with bringing out the best in artists he produced “by making everyone around him want to be themselves."

While recording with Michael Jackson, whom Jones called “Smelly" because he referred to music he liked as “smelly jelly," Jones said they would know they’d struck gold on a song when they both felt goosebumps. But Jones struggled to pare down their excess material, with Jackson constantly protesting: “Oh no, that’s the jelly."

Jones had a son and six daughters, including actresses Rashida Jones and Kidada Jones, who entered the spotlight when she dated the late rap star Tupac Shakur.

Gareth Vipers contributed to this article.