A genre-leaping Renaissance man who memorably collaborated with everyone from Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson to Miles Davis, Paul Simon and Queen Latifah, Quincy Jones did so many things so exceedingly well in the worlds of music, film, publishing and television that it’s difficult to succinctly state the breadth and depth of his accomplishments.

The 28-time Grammy Award winner, 2010 National Medal of Arts honoree and 2016 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee died Sunday at 91 at his Bel-Air home from undisclosed causes. His nearly eight-decade career saw him soar equally as a top-call producer, composer, arranger, publisher, broadcaster and tireless champion for social change. Or, as Jones put it in a 1996 San Diego Union-Tribune interview: “I was fortunate enough to be born at just the right time to witness and participate in some of this country’s greatest cultural events.”

That interview took place just two weeks before the telecast of the 1996 edition of the Academy Awards, for which he served as the producer. It was an easy fit for the Chicago native and seven-time Oscar-winner, who in 1995 became the first Black artist to earn the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

“I don’t feel one drop of pressure, and the s—‘s flying all day long, man, catastrophes and train wrecks and fires and stuff,” Jones said. All quotes in this appreciation article, unless otherwise noted, are from multiple interviews he did with the Union-Tribune.

“But, you know, it’s all going to be OK,” he continued. “Most of the people in the show, I know really well: Jack Nicholson, Sidney Poitier and the young ones — Goldie Hawn, I did (the music to) her first picture (1969’s ‘Cactus Flower’), when she got her first Oscar. So I feel comfortable. It’s not an environment that makes me feel uptight.”

If there was any environment that made Jones nervous, he kept it under his vest.

Best known to pop-music fans fans as the producer of Michael Jackson’s landmark “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” albums, Jones also produced 1985’s all-star “We Are the World” fundraising single, which featured Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Harry Belafonte and Cyndi Lauper among its many stars.

After launching his career in 1951, when the teen-aged Jones joined jazz vibraphone great Lionel Hampton’s big band, he worked with a dizzying array of artists. They include his boyhood pal Ray Charles, film director Steven Spielberg, author Alice Walker, Aretha Franklin, gangsta rapper Ice-T and bebop trumpet great Dizzy Gillespie (who hired Jones, then 23, to be his musical director in 1956).

Jones scored numerous films, including “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple,” both Oscar-nominated. He founded the influential hip-hop magazine Vibe, helmed his own record company, Qwest, and produced recordings by such varied artists as jazz giant Sarah Vaughan and then 16-year-old pop singer Lesley Gore, most memorably on her chart-topping 1963 hit “It’s My Party.”

Jones also made his mark as an executive producer for films and TV. His credits included everything “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “The History of “Rock ‘n’ Roll” to “MadTV” and the 2023 adaptation of “The Color Purple.”

In 2016, the then-83-year-old Jones was the oldest artist to be enshrined at that year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions. The other honorees included Heart, Rush, Public Enemy, Booker T & The MG’s, Randy Newman and the late Donna Summer, but Jones was easily the hippest artist in the house that night at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles.

The audience gasped with surprise when Oprah Winfrey appeared on stage to induct him. She thanked Jones for changing “the trajectory of my life” when he persuaded director Spielberg to cast the then-little-known Chicago TV host in the award-winning “The Color Purple.”

“He is a living legend,” Winfrey said of Jones, “who both defines and defies the word ‘legend.'”

In his acceptance speech, Jones joked with the audience about his being the evening’s senior honoree. “I didn’t want to get into the Hall of Fame too soon, so I waited,” he said.

Recalling his early days as a budding jazz trumpeter and composer, Jones said: “We never thought about being famous or rich. We came from the school of wanting to be the best musician you could be.”

Striving to be best was a hallmark of his career, no matter what musical genres he was deftly performing or fusing.

Jones’ 1989 album, “Back on the Block,” won six Grammys. It featured such rappers as Ice-T and Kool Moe Dee alongside such jazz immortals as Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald.

While many listeners see little or no connection between hip-hop and the musical styles that formed the foundation for the jazz Jones grew up playing, he was well aware of the vital continuum that links the 1,000-year-old music of the West African griots (or oral historians) with the field hollers of Black American slaves and the gospel, blues, jazz, rock, soul, funk and hip-hop traditions that followed.

“It’s all the same thing!” Jones told me. “And even a lot of rappers don’t know that their roots are in the griot tradition. A lot of times I get flack for being so eclectic. But, since I was 13 we played everything, from Sousa marches to bebop, to rhythm and blues, to big-band music. And I’ve done that all my life. So when I got into (working with) Michael Jackson, a lot of beboppers said: ‘(Expletive), man. He went for the swimming pool!’

“But this is not a stretch for me. I always want to hear that (musical) family together. Blues, funk, bebop, R&B, hip-hop, gospel, because it all came from the same place. And together, it has such a collective power, far more than any of the individual parts. Radio gives people the flavor of the week. So you have to go to everybody and say: ‘Hey, man! This is music to celebrate — all of it.’ “

In 2001, Jones was the driving force behind the five-part VH1 TV series, “Say It Loud! A Celebration of Black Music in America.” It was just one of the vehicles he used to spotlight the too-often undersung contributions of Black artists, not just to American music but to its overall culture.

“Too many sides of the background of African-American music haven’t been exposed,” Jones said at the time. “I’ve been digging into this for the past 27 years, and back then it was more about sociology than musicology. The real history of African-Americans is all in the music, because the books were all written by the (white) victors. The coded messages in spirituals, the enigmatic emotions in the blues — all those things tell a real story of being here in this country.

“It’s always fascinated me that there’s no such thing as ‘the original gospel singer’ or ‘the original blues singer.’ For the most part, it’s music that represents a whole life-experience, and a whole people, not just one person. I guess every race and religion is like that.”

“There are common denominators in every era,” continued Jones, who was saluted alongside Van Cliburn, Jack Nicholson, Julie Andrews and Luciano Pavarotti at the 2001 Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C.

“In any genre, you’ll find call-and-response, whether it’s the music of Count Basie or doo-wop, gospel or rap,” he continued. “This music is a fascinating saga. And the evidence of its depth is that, across the entire planet, the youth of the world has adopted this music as their emotional Esperanto. And this holds true for different generations of the music, not just the latest genre, which is rap.”

A well-schooled musician who was entirely free of pretense, Jones was a gracious and charming host when I interviewed him for a Jazz Times magazine cover story at his Bel-Air mansion in 2003, following the publication of his engrossing book, “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones.”

“You should know what you can do, and what you can’t do,” says Jones, when asked to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses. “And what you can’t do, you try to find the people who are the best in the world to do that. To me, that’s logical, that makes sense.

“I guess it boils down to being lucky enough to have enough victories to keep you going. Because a lot of steps that lead to defeat make you introverted and make you retreat. And it’s just the opposite when you take a chance, take a step and have that step become victorious. And when you win, you’re almost there. The next step you make will be a giant step, because that’s the way we’re built as human beings — that promise we have inside of us that God put there.

“Stravinsky said that the big responsibility of an artist is to be a great observer and really pay attention. Pay attention! The things that have guided my life are to pay attention, be true to yourself and figure it out. That’s really what it’s about. My life was messed up when I was young, but so what? Get over it. Figure it out. Just inhale every second of life.”

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