Composer, Arranger, Songwriter, Record, Movie and Television Producer. First gaining notoriety in the 1950s as a jazz arranger, his career covered eight decades. He was nominated for Grammy Awards over 80 times and won 28, including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992. Born to Quincy, Sr., a carpenter and semi-pro baseball player, and his wife, Ella, Jones spent most of his youth in Bremerton, Washington, where he learned to play the trumpet. One of his first gigs was working with then ingenue blind pianist/vocalist Ray Charles. Moving to Boston in the early 1950s, he briefly studied music at the predecessor to the Berklee College of Music before joining vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band as a trumpeter and arranger. Branching into free-lance arranging, Jones worked for such jazz artists as Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Clifford Brown and Cannonball Adderley. In 1961, he was hired by Mercury Records to supervise its artists and repertoire as “A&R” director. He moved facilely between jazz arranging and pop music and film scoring, the latter starting to eclipse his jazz work. Jones produced hit recordings for pop singer Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including “It’s My Party”) and arranged and conducted several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. In 1968, Jones became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “The Eyes of Love” from the film Banning. Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African American to be nominated twice in the same year. From 1969 to 1981 (with a short time off for recuperation from a brain aneurysm in 1974), Jones worked for Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’s A&M Records. During that time, he became one of the most sought-after and acclaimed music producers worldwide, enabling him to start his own record label, Qwest Records, in 1980. Jones produced three of the most successful albums by pop star Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the multi-celebrity charity song “We Are the World,” which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. In 1971, Jones became the first African American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards. In 1995, he was the first African American to receive the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the second most Oscar-nominated African American, with seven nominations each. In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the Ahmet Ertegun Award category. From 1974 to 1990, Quincy Jones was married to television and movie actress Peggy Lipton, with whom he had two daughters, Kadida and Rashida, who later became an actress and screenwriter. Lipton was starring on the television series “The Mod Squad” when she and Jones first met in 1969 on a friend’s boat in the Bahamas. They began dating two years later and moved in together soon after. Jones’ autobiography was published in 2001. His life and career were the subject of the biopic documentary Quincy (2018), which was directed by his daughter, Rashida Jones.