Music producer and Ahmet Ertegun Award recipient Quincy Jones attends the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2013 Inductees announcement at Nokia Theatre L.A.

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Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Music producer and Ahmet Ertegun Award recipient Quincy Jones attends the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2013 Inductees announcement at Nokia Theatre L.A.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Quincy Jones, the famed music producer who helped artists dominate popular music for half a century, has died.

His publicist says he passed away peacefully at his home in California. He was 91 years old.

NPR’s Walter Ray Watson described Jones’ talent as one that produced music that hooked ears, warmed hearts and moved feet to dance.

Along with Michael Jackson, he broke open the pop music world with production on songs like Bad, Billie Jean, and Rock with You. His contributions had more than a hundred million records sold, including Thriller, the best selling album of all time.

It might be hard to imagine now, but record execs doubted whether Quincy Jones was the right fit to produce Michael Jackson’s debut as a solo adult artist.

An unlikely success story

Born Quincy Delight Jones Jr., he was the son of a Chicago carpenter and a housewife mother, who sang church songs at home.

Jones faced gang violence as a child of the Great Depression. And at age 10, his family moved to Seattle, where his dad joined the war effort, working in a shipyard.

“Gangsters. Lot of them are gangsters. Back in the thirties, it was all I ever saw with machine guns,” was how he described his Chicago neighborhood growing up in a 2008 interview with NPR’s Michele Norris.

As a kid, he was a ringleader of mischief. And one day with a bunch of boys, he targeted a roomful of freshly baked pies at a rec center. They broke in, ate all the pies. Then Jones opened a door.

“And I saw – in the shadows, I saw a piano. Then I almost closed the door, and then something deep inside me said, ‘Open the door again.’ And I went back into the room and slowly went over to that piano, and I felt the goose bumps and everything.”

That changed his life, he said. By high school, Jones picked up the trumpet. Soon after, he gained a lifelong friend in a blind 16-year-old pianist named Ray Charles.

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A musical superpower

Jones was still a teenager when he was hired by legendary vibraphonist and band leader Lionel Hampton. His talents opened the door, and his skills took him everywhere.

After producing and scouting for some of the biggest talent in the industry, Mercury Records promoted Quincy Jones to an executive, a first for a Black man at a major record label. His tastes and instincts led him to cultivate some of the biggest hits and artists of the past decades.

Listen to the full episode of Consider This to hear Watson detail the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Jones.

This episode was produced by Marc Rivers and Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Patrick Jarenwattananon. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.