The boy who listened through the wall and ended up producing Thriller

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on 14 March 1933, and his first piano lessons were not lessons at all. His mother sang religious songs around the house, and a next-door neighbour, Lucy Jackson, played stride piano. At five or six he would listen through the walls, and after he finally heard her play, she later recalled, she could not get him off her piano. Childhood was not easy: when he was young, his mother had a breakdown and was sent to a mental institution.

After World War II the family moved to Seattle, where he attended the city's university, and he then studied at what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor. In the early 1960s he produced pop hits for Lesley Gore, among them “It's My Party”, and he arranged and conducted several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. He also kept up a lifelong friendship with Ray Charles.

The late seventies and eighties made him a household name. He produced three of Michael Jackson's most successful albums, Off the Wall in 1979, Thriller in 1982 and Bad in 1987. In 1985 he produced and conducted the charity song “We Are the World”, which raised money for famine victims in Ethiopia. Alongside all that he wrote film scores, including The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job and The Color Purple, and won an Emmy for his music for the miniseries Roots.

The honours: 28 Grammy Awards, seven Oscar nominations, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011 and, after his death, an Academy Honorary Award in 2025. Time named him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the twentieth century. He died on 3 November 2024 at the age of 91, a career that began with a child pressed against a neighbour's wall.