Quincy Jones

Music saved Quincy Jones, said Dylan Jones in GQ (U.K.). Growing up in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s, the producer didn’t have much of a family life. His mother was incarcerated in a mental asylum, while his carpenter father struggled with single parenthood. Jones and his younger brother Lloyd ran free, doing small jobs for mobsters. “Until I was 11, a gangster was all I wanted to be,” he says. “I saw terrible things in Chicago. Dead bodies, piles of bloody money, dirty cops, dirty women, tommy guns. I saw it all.” When Jones was 10, his father remarried, and the family moved to Bremerton, near Seattle. But he continued his criminal liaisons, running errands for local prostitutes and pimps. At age 11, he broke into the neighborhood recreation center and stumbled across an upright piano. He tapped a key, and the sound of that note changed everything. “As soon as I hit it, I knew I was gone. The concept of playing music never occurred to me, even though it was around me all the time in Chicago,” says Jones, who went on to produce hits for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. “I knew right there and then that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It saved my life.”

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