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Quincy Jones and Frank Sinatra: the audacious partnership that rocketed them to another planet

Jones was behind many inflection points in American music, but it all began with a brotherhood with Ol’ Blue Eyes

Jones wasn’t just a relative kid in the game, a 25-year-old Black American trumpeter turned composer/arranger who had been living in Paris for about a year; he moved there partly to study under Nadia Boulanger, renowned for teaching Aaron Copland, Burt Bacharach and other leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. It wasn’t until a teenage Jones moved to Washington during the second world war and resettled in Seattle that he developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger who would eventually complement Sinatra to the point of redefining the Great American Songbook. In the end Jones’s fingerprints aren’t just all over everything from the Italian Job to the Sanford and Son theme to Austin Powers’s Soul Bossa Nova, but also on the film scoring careers of the RZA, Pharrell and other Black musicians too.

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