Q : the autobiography of Quincy Jones.

Prodigiously talented and amazingly protean, Quincy Jones has led one of the most musically influential American lives of this century. In Q, he finally tells it all, from the glamour and string of glittering achievements to the private pain, revealed for the first time with stunning honesty.Quincy Jones grew up poor on the mean streets of Chicago's South Side, brushing against the law and feeling the pain of his mother's descent into madness. When his father moved the family west to Seattle, though, he took up the trumpet and was literally saved by music. A prodigy, he played backup for Billie Holiday and toured the world with the Lionel Hampton Band before leaving his teens. Soon, though, he found his true calling, inaugurating a career whose highlights have included arranging albums for Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and Count Basie; composing the scores of such films as The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood, and The Color Purple, and the theme songs for the television shows "Ironsides", "Sanford and Son", and "The Cosby Show"; producing the bestselling album of all time, Michael Jackson's Thriller, and the bestselling single "We Are the World"; and producing and arranging his own highly praised albums, including the Grammy Award -- winning Back on the Block, a striking marriage of jazz, rock, and hip-hop. His musical achievements, in a career that spans every style of American popular music, have yielded an incredible seventy-six G