|
|
 
|
     
|
 Quincy Jones was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 14, 1933 and grew up in Seattle, Washington, where he began to learn trumpet in 1947 and took lessons from Clark Terry in 1950. From 1951 to 1953 he traveled to Europe as a member of Lionel Hampton's band, with which he recorded frequently in Paris. He also began to work as a freelance arranger providing musical "charts" for such artists as Cannonball Adderley, Ray Anthony, Count Basie, Clifford Brown, Tommy Dorsey, Art Farmer, Gene Krupa, Oscar Pettiford, Clark Terry, and Dinah Washington. Arranger, composer, bandleader and trumpeter, he was also the pianist for a recording session with Annie Ross in Stockholm in 1953. He played trumpet in, and was music director for, Dizzy Gillespie's band for a tour of the Middle East and South America in 1956. The next year, he signed a contract with Mercury Records and traveled to Paris, where he spent the next 18 months working for Barclay Records as a producer, arranger and conductor. He returned to New York in 1959, then toured Europe as music director for Harold Arlen's blues opera, Free and Easy. When the show closed (Paris, February 1960) he toured Europe and the U.S. with its band, which included such musicians as Jimmy Cleveland, Clark Terry, and Phil Woods. Later that year, he arranged the music for an album by Ray Charles. In 1961, he settled in New York as head of the artists and repertory department for Mercury, and, in 1964, he became the organization's vice-president, the first black man to hold such a position. Quincy Jones' compositions and arrangements have been highly influential. His work of the late 1950s was characterized by the use of small-group jazz concepts in a big-band context, and was notable for its technical accomplishment. In the 1970s, he made significant contributions to the recordings of several popular singers, notably Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson. Manuscript scores of his works are in the holdings of the BMI Archives in New York. In the movie In the Key of Oscar, he has high praise for Oscar Peterson. 1 Selected Recordings Footnotes |