Quincy Jones's long career as a music composer lends insight into popular music's influence on the television and film media. In 1951 a teenage Jones began working as a trumpet player and arranger for Lionel Hamp­ton. During his early career, he played with some of the best-known names in black bebop and jazz, performers such as Count Basie, Clark Terry, Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, ·and Sarah Vaughan. He toured Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa during the 1950s. In 1957 he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. During this period he also became a major publisher of music.

     However, failed business ventures in 1959 forced him to sell his music publishing catalog. Jones overcame this major financial setback by working as an ex­ecutive at A and M Records and by working as an arranger for Dinah Washington in New York City. He became vice president of Mercury Records in 1964, the first African-American executive at a major record label.

     In 1961, Jet magazine, a weekly entertainment peri­odical directed to an African-American readership, awarded Jones the title of best arranger and composer. But despite honors from his African-American com­munity and excellent critical reviews, he recognized that jazz music was not earning high record sales. He decided then to produce more commercial songs. In 1963, he branched out to develop the talent of a white teenage singer, Lesley Gore, with whom he recorded the pop hit "It's My Party." Jones continued to work with talented white artists such as Frank Sinatra, for whom he conducted and arranged Sinatra: Live in Las Vegas at the Sands with Count Basie (1966). By adapt­ing to technological changes that gave more control to engineers and producers, Jones achieved commercial success in the music recording industry during the I960s. Yet, he still desired to compose scores for mo­tion pictures, and his success allowed him to pursue the small openings in media industries previously closed to African-American artists.

     After Jones scored his first film, The Boy in the Tree (1960), he scored The Pawnbroker (1965) for director Sidney Lumet. Jones's first major Hollywood contract was with Universal Pictures. He became an African­ American pioneer in film and television industries dur­ing the late I960s, and he had few black colleagues. At this time, television news reports were increasingly presenting images of the United States facing racial conflict. Amid the struggle for civil rights, Jones worked in Hollywood to help destroy the negative stereotypes of African Americans. In 1965 he was hired to score the film Mirage, starring Gregory Peck, and he scored In the Heat of the Night (1967), starring a top box-office star of the era, Sidney Poitier.

     In 1967 Jones scored the pilot and eight episodes of the dramatic television series Ironside. In creating the Ironside theme, he was the first composer to utilize a synthesizer in the arrangement of a television score. During the same year, he composed the theme to the television movie Split Second to an Epitaph. Jones also wrote the theme song for Bill Cosby's first situation comedy, The Bill Cosby Show (NBC; 1970) and went on to score 56 episodes.

     In a brief two-week period between film and television scores, Jones returned to record making with the jazz album Walking. The album won a Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group in 1969.

     In 1972 Jones wrote the theme to the NBC Mystery Movie series, and his momentum in the television industry continued to grow. During the same year, he scored 26 episodes of The Bill Cosby Variety Series, and in 1973 he composed the theme to the comedy program Sanford and Son, starring comedian Redd Foxx.

     In 1974, soon after his Body Heat album reached the top of the music charts, Jones suffered from health problems. A brain aneurysm required two surgical procedures and he had to stop playing the trumpet.

     After a four-year hiatus, during which he concentrated on his own music productions, Jones returned to television in 1977 to score the ABC miniseries Roots, one of the highest-rated programs in television history. His score accented the exploration of African chants and rhythms as indigenous to American culture and garnered Jones an Emmy Award. Coinciding with this success in television, he scored The Wiz (1978), a Universal Pictures all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

     Between 1963, when he entered the Hollywood film industry as a film composer, and 1990, Jones earned 38 film credits. Most notably, he co produced the critically acclaimed film The Color Purple (1985) with director Steven Spielberg. In 1994 Jones was honored with an Academy Award for his achievements in the film industry.

     Despite his success in television and film, Jones has never lost interest in spotting talent in black music. During the 1970s, he continued to cultivate new performers in this arena. He created technically advanced, funk-influenced albums for the Brothers Johnson, Chaka Khan, and Rufus. In 1977 he produced Michael Jackson's Off the Wall album, which sold seven million albums (in the pre-MTV era). His production of Michael Jackson's record-breaking pop album Thriller (1984) became a musical landmark.

     In 1981 Jones left A and M and formed his own Qwest label at Warner Brothers. The Qwest label produced hits for Patty Austin and James Ingram and captured Lena Horne's performance on Broadway; these recording projects earned Grammy Awards for Jones. In 1985 he produced the all-star recording of "We Are the World," to help performer Harry Belafonte's charity drive to raise world awareness of famine. From the song's popular music video, Jones became a recognizable face to the general public. He raised money for Jesse Jackson's historic run for the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 1988 and produced The Jesse Jackson Show in 1990, granting a forum to a high-profile black figure in U.S. politics.

     Jones discovered a larger television audience by producing situation comedies. In 1990 Fresh Prince of Bel-Air premiered, starring a popular rap artist, Will Smith, and the series became a highly rated program on NBC. Also in 1990, Jones formed the multimedia entertainment organization Quincy Jones Entertainment Company and Quincy Jones Broadcasting, to acquire television and radio properties. Three years later  joined with David Salzman to create the production company QDE, which has produced the sitcom In the House (NBC and UPN, 1995-99) and the sketch comedy/variety series Mad TV (FOX 1995–).

     In 1994, Jones co founded Qwest Broadcasting, a minority-owned company that would purchase television stations in Atlanta, Georgia, and New Orleans, Louisiana; five years later, Jones and his partners sold this company for around $270 million. In 1996 Jones was executive producer for the Academy Awards program. In 1998 he established the production company Quincy Jones Media Group, Inc., with the aim of pricing projects for both film and television.

     While overcoming racial barriers and redefining several genres in music composition, Jones's creative persistence in the music business helped to maneuver black music across the color line of the musical mainstream and into every form of media expression. Jones's body of work spans over half a century and has opened the door for the growth of successful black entrepreneurs in television, film, and music. Since Miles Davis's death, many critics cite Quincy Jones as the only remaining figure from the bebop era who has stayed contemporary and whose work continues to have an impact on these three closely integrated media industries.