Name at birth: Quincy Delight Jones, Jr.

Quincy Jones started his musical career as a trumpet player, touring with Lionel Hampton in the early 1950s. He soon gained a reputation as an arranger and composer, and was leading his own bands by the end of the decade. Since then he has worked as an arranger, composer and producer for some of the greatest performers of swing, jazz, blues and hip-hop, from Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra to Little Richard and Michael Jackson. Nicknamed Q, Jones also became a noted composer of film and television scores who was especially active in the 1960s and 1970s: he composed moody, jazzy scores for films like In the Heat of the Night (1967, starring Sidney Poitier), The Anderson Tapes (1971, starring Sean Connery) and The Getaway (1972, starring Steve McQueen). He produced Michael Jacksons biggest hit albums, including Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987), and was also the producer and conductor for the famous We Are The World charity single in 1985. He founded VIBE magazine and Qwest Broadcasting and is the winner of over two dozen Grammys. Quincy Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

Quincy Jones’s arrangement of “Fly Me To The Moon” was the first song played on the moon, during the lunar visit of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11 in 1969.