HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO QUINCY JONES AS HE TURNS 87 TODAY
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. His career spans over 60 years in the entertainment industry with a record 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.
Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor, before moving on to work in pop music and film scores. In 1971, he became the first African-American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. In 1995, he was the first African-American to receive the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Jones was the producer, with Michael Jackson, of Jackson’s albums Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987), as well as the producer and conductor of the 1985 charity song “We Are the World”, which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as the winner, alongside Lou Adler, of the Ahmet Ertegun Award. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time magazine.
Jones’s social activism began in the 1960s with his support of Martin Luther King Jr. Jones is one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music (IBAM), whose events aim to raise enough funds for the creation of a national library of African-American art and music.
Jones supports a number of other charities, including the NAACP, GLAAD, Peace Games, AmfAR, and the Maybach Foundation.
The octagenarian was a recipient of several awards, some of which are Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1984, Grammy Legend Award in 1992 (one of only 15 people ever to receive it), Second in the list of all-time Grammy award wins Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards in 2008, John F. Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama on March 2, 2011.
