Quincy Jones: the genuine musical genius who reinvented cool

He won 28 Grammy Awards, and his arrangement of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ for Sinatra was the first record to be played on the Moon

I last saw him play with his big band in Spain about six or seven years ago, but around 2011, when he was still fully operational, I spent an evening with him in his Los Angeles palace, which also doubled as a museum of the collected work of a genuine musical genius.

Then aged 78, Quincy lived way up in the Bel Air mountains in a 20,000-sq ft mansion bought six years previously from Julio Iglesias, far away from the hissing of summer lawns in Beverly Hills.

Michael Jackson poses with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 1984. Photo: Doug Pizac

This was real luxury – a proper Hollywood mansion with extraordinary views across LA that stretched all the way to Long Beach. The house was full of soul, as well as the trinkets of success. This was a house of spoils, a house of acknowledgement, the recognition of a creative life lived to the full.