05/17/2026
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He was forty-one years old when his friends booked the Shrine Auditorium for his memorial service. Quincy Jones survived the first brain surgery and walked into the building, where Sidney Poitier hugged him and Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye and Sarah Vaughan sang for what should have been his final year on earth.
He went back to the hospital, survived the second operation too, and lived another fifty years. He produced Thriller eight years after his own funeral.
He was eleven years old when he broke into a building to steal lemon meringue pie. That is the night Quincy Jones, in an armory in Bremerton, Washington, found what he was going to do with the next eighty years of his life.
It was 1944. The armory doubled as the community center for Sinclair Park, a segregated wartime housing project the Navy had built above Sinclair Inlet to house Black shipyard families.
Quincy and his friends had heard there were pies and ice cream cones in the kitchen. They slipped in late one night to see if it was true.
It was. They ate until they could not move.
Quincy wandered off from the others and pushed open the door of the supervisor's office. In the corner sat a little spinet piano, the kind nobody plays unless they have to.
He touched one key. The boy who had been pinned to a fence with a switchblade on the wrong block of Chicago, who had watched his mother taken from him in a straitjacket, who had ridden a Trailways bus across the country with his clothes but not his toys, stood in that office and felt something inside him rearrange.
He wrote it down decades later in his autobiography. Each note seemed to fill up another empty space he felt inside, he wrote, and at eleven he knew this was it for him forever.
To understand why a stranger's keys hit a child that hard, you have to understand the empty space.
Sarah Frances Wells Jones was a bank officer and apartment manager on the South Side. She was also, by the time her elder son was a small boy, in the grip of a schizophrenic breakdown that her family did not yet have a name for.
She had smashed Quincy's birthday cake at his own party. She wandered through the house preaching to strangers, escaped from institutions to return home, and once burst into a club where her teenage son was performing to tell him God did not like sinners.
When Quincy was seven, the men came for her. He watched them put his mother in a straitjacket and carry her out of his life, and seventy-eight years later he still spoke of it as the morning he lost her.
He told an interviewer, plainly, that the affirmations he repeated to himself every morning of his adult life were what he used in place of a mother. He had been talking himself through her absence since the year they took her.
Outside the apartment, Chicago was just as hard. He wandered onto the wrong block once and a kid pinned his hand to a fence with a switchblade, leaving a scar he showed reporters into his eighties.
He ran errands for the local rackets. He saw enough in those years to write later that he knew that city, and he meant it the way a man means it when the place has tried to take him.
In the summer of 1943 his father picked the boys up from a barbershop one afternoon and said one sentence. We're leaving.
Can we get our toys, the ten-year-old asked. The answer was no, there was no time, the Trailways bus was waiting and they had to be on it before night.
They stopped in Idaho to eat and discovered the white restaurants would not serve them. They sat in a stranger's kitchen because a Black family in town had taken them in for the meal.
Bremerton was supposed to be the better place. It was, and it was not.
His father got work at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The family moved into a small rental on Linden Place in Sinclair Heights, in a neighborhood newly built and segregated by design.
But the community center was open to the kids. And on the night Quincy walked into that office and stood in front of those keys, the empty space he had been carrying for four years began, for the first time, to fill.
Mrs. Ayres caught the boys. She let him stay.
He stayed and played one note after another into the small hours. He came back the next day, and the day after that, and for the rest of his life he was never not playing.
By thirteen he had a trumpet. By fourteen he was meeting a sixteen-year-old kid in the Black district of Seattle who could play be-bop like Charlie Parker, sing like Nat Cole, and read Braille faster than most sighted people could read print.
The kid's name was Ray Charles. They played five clubs a night together before either of them could legally drink.
At eighteen Quincy was on the road with Lionel Hampton, the swing-era king. At twenty-four he was in a small apartment on Paris's Rue Ballu studying composition with Nadia Boulanger, the woman who had also taught Aaron Copland and Philip Glass.
Boulanger gave him the sentence he carried for the rest of his life. Quincy, she told him, your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.
Then came the disaster nobody talks about. In 1959 Quincy poured every dollar he had into a touring jazz musical called Free and Easy, with a Harold Arlen score and an eighteen-piece all-star band he had built himself.
The plan was Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, and then Broadway with Sammy Davis Jr. picked up in England. The show collapsed in three months.
He was twenty-six years old and stranded in Europe with thirty people to feed, families included, and thirty-five tons of equipment to move from one city to the next. He kept the band working for ten more months.
He hocked his publishing companies. He played any venue that would book them, any small concert, any festival, anything that paid the next hotel bill.
When he finally got everyone home, he was one hundred forty-five thousand dollars in debt. That was a fortune in 1960 dollars, and most of it sat on his shoulders alone.
He said the quiet part out loud in an interview years later. Those ten months in Europe were the closest he ever came to giving up on everything.
He had had the best jazz band on the planet, he said in another interview, and they were literally starving. That was when he learned the difference between music and the music business, and that if he wanted to survive he was going to have to learn the second one too.
Irving Green at Mercury Records, an old friend, loaned him the money to pay it off. Then he made Quincy an A&R director, then a vice president, and the first Black executive at a major American record label.
That is the line that makes the memorial posts. The line that does not make those posts is what he had to walk through to get there.
Then his work began to pay. Arranging Frank Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon, the recording Apollo 11's astronauts played on the surface of the moon in 1969.
Producing pop records for Lesley Gore when she was a teenager. Scoring films, scoring Roots, scoring In the Heat of the Night.
Then came the summer of 1974. The main artery to his brain let go without warning, and he later said it felt like a thunderclap inside his skull.
It was an aneurysm. The surgery ran seven and a half hours, and when the doctors got inside they found a second aneurysm waiting to blow.
They told him they would have to go back in eight weeks for the other one. The odds of surviving the second operation were one in a hundred.
Richard Pryor and Cannonball Adderley and Billy Eckstine had come too. They were there to say goodbye to a man who was supposed to be dead by autumn.
His neurologist sat next to him to keep him from getting too excited. He watched the room sing his praises to his face.
A photograph from that night showed him in Sidney Poitier's arms. It stayed framed in his house for the rest of his life.
The surgeons told him he could never play the trumpet again. The pressure of blowing the horn could dislodge the metal clip they had placed inside his skull, and if the clip shifted, he would be gone in seconds.
He had been a trumpeter since he was thirteen. Lionel Hampton had hired him at eighteen, Dizzy Gillespie had taken him through South America, and Sinatra had pulled him into the inner room of American song because of the ear he had built playing.
He tried the trumpet anyway, once, on a tour in Japan after the surgeries. He felt the pain start behind his eye, the clip shifting in his skull, and he set the horn down for good.
That was the loss nobody writes about. The boy who had been found by music became the man who had to put his horn down to stay alive.
What came after the surgeries is what most people remember. Off the Wall in 1979 with Michael Jackson, then Thriller in 1982, still the best-selling album in history.
We Are the World in 1985, written with Lionel Richie and recorded in one all-night session after the American Music Awards. The Color Purple soundtrack the same year, and a young talk show host named Oprah Winfrey cast as Sofia because Oprah spelled backward was Harpo.
He won twenty-eight Grammy Awards. He was nominated for eighty.
He produced two hundred albums and fifty-one film and television scores. He recorded almost three thousand songs.
He started Vibe magazine in 1993. He built homes in South Africa and Municipal Child Centers in Addis Ababa, Asmara, Freetown, Kigali, and Nablus.
He had seven children. He buried his younger brother Lloyd in 1998.
Quincy Jones died on November 3, 2024, in his home in Bel Air, California, at ninety-one years old. He had ridden one note from a spinet piano in Mrs. Ayres's office for eighty years.
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Source: HistoryLink.org Quincy Jones biography by Peter Blecha; Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (Doubleday, 2001); Academy of Achievement Quincy Jones interview; Linda N. Bayer, Quincy Jones (Chelsea House, 2001); DownBeat memorial by John McDonough, November 5, 2024; CNN obituary, November 4, 2024; GQ (2018), The Hollywood Reporter (2008), and Newsweek interviews on the 1974 aneurysms; Quincy Jones's 2018 Facebook post; Seattle Times memorial, November 10, 2024; National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Moments oral history; KNKX Public Radio coverage of Sinclair Park; Wikipedia.
