Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones was born in Chicago in 1933. His father worked as a carpenter and played semi-professional baseball. His mother battled mental illness and was eventually institutionalized. When his father divorced and remarried, his stepmother moved in with her children. The blended family, which included eight children, lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The streets of their neighborhood resembled a war zone, and Jones recalls witnessing shootings and knifings on his way to school.

When he was 10, Jones moved with his family to Bremerton, Washington, where his father found work in a naval shipyard. An enterprising adolescent, Jones shined shoes, delivered newspapers, worked at a dry cleaning shop, and set pins in a bowling alley. His move from listening to playing music was instigated by a local barber, Eddie Lewis, who played the trumpet when business got slow. Jones, fascinated by what he heard, joined his school band and, at 13, made his professional debut at a YMCA dance. He earned $7 for the gig and was hooked.

In 1947, his family moved to Seattle, and Jones began playing professionally in jazz clubs there. At 16, he met Ray Charles; the two jammed together at local clubs, and Charles taught him how to write and arrange music. Later, he met William James "Count" Basie, who rounded out his education in music arrangement.

Jones joined Mercury Records and, in 1963, won his first Grammy as a jazz arranger for interpreting Ray Charles's I Can't Stop Loving You for Count Basie. He has worked with major entertainers such as Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Peggy Lee, Paul Simon, and Michael Jackson. He composed the score for the movie The Pawnbroker and composed soundtracks for films such as In the Heat of the Night, In Cold Blood, and The Wiz.

The all-time most nominated Grammy artist, Jones has a total of 79 nominations and 28 awards. He also has received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Jones was the focus of the 1990 Warner Bros. film titled Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones.

During his career, Jones has faced racial discrimination, suffered a nervous breakdown, and survived two operations for a life-threatening brain aneurysm. But his will to succeed and his faith in God got him through these difficult times. As he often tells recording artists in his studio, "You have to leave space for God to walk through the room."

At the 1982 Grammy Awards, Jones said, "This is when a person who doesn't believe in a higher power has got to be a little bent, because there are too many things that came together for it just to be an accident."