Early Life
Jones was born in Chicago, the oldest son of Sarah Frances (née Wells), an apartment complex manager and bank executive who suffered from schizophrenia, and Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter. When he was 10, his family moved to Bremerton, Washington and he attended Seattle's Garfield High School. It was in Seattle that Jones, 14, first met a 17-year-old Ray Charles and developed musically under the tutelage of Robert Blackwell.
His brother, Richard Jones, is a federal district court judge in Seattle, and has presided over several very high-profile cases, including the notorious Green River Killer Gary Ridgway.
In 1951, Jones won a scholarship to the Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston, Massachusetts. However, he abandoned his studies when he received an offer to tour as a trumpeter with the bandleader Lionel Hampton. While Jones was on the road with Hampton, he displayed a gift for arranging songs. Jones relocated to New York City, where he received a number of freelance commissions arranging songs for artists like Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and his close friend Ray Charles.
Read more about this topic: Quincy Jones
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“I declare
Two lineages electrify the air,
That will like pennons from a mast
Fly over sleep and life and death
Till sun is powerless to decoy
A single seed above the earth:
Lineage of sorrow: lineage of joy....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)