Over the course of 91 years, Quincy Jones did pretty much everything you could do in the entertainment industry. He was a musician, arranger, composer, solo artist, record company executive, mogul, entrepreneur and a producer not just of music but of films and TV – and, as was noted in Chris Heath’s extraordinary, headline-grabbing 2018 profile piece Quincy Jones Has a Story About That, he had known everyone. “The ghetto Gump”, as he called himself, referring to Forrest, was the thread that linked Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to Dr Dre and the Weeknd; a musician who’d appeared with Elvis Presley and Amy Winehouse, Count Basie and Bono, Nat King Cole and Young Thug; the man who had a credit on Sinatra At the Sands and Harry’s House by Harry Styles.
It’s a résumé unlike any other. How did he achieve it? He was clearly driven, perhaps as the result of a difficult childhood. Born on the gang-ridden South Side of Chicago during the Great Depression, Jones wandered into “the wrong neighbourhood” aged seven, was stabbed through the hand with a switchblade and attacked with an icepick. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Jones spent time living with his grandmother in Kentucky in such poverty that he claimed they survived by eating rats. Then his father moved the family to Washington and remarried, to a woman Jones said was physically abusive.
