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Quincy Jones, a titan of American entertainment who worked with stars from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and Will Smith, has died. He was aged 91.

Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, said he died on Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

Jones was arguably the most versatile pop cultural figure of the 20th Century, perhaps best known for producing the albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad for Michael Jackson in the 1980s, which made the singer the biggest pop star of all time. Jones also produced music for Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and many others.

He was also a successful composer of dozens of film scores, and had numerous chart hits under his own name. Jones was a bandleader in big band jazz, an arranger for jazz stars including Count Basie, and a multi-instrumentalist, most proficiently on trumpet and piano.

His TV and film production company, founded in 1990, had major success with the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and other shows, and he continued to innovate well into his 80s, launching Qwest TV in 2017, an on-demand music TV service.

Jones is third only to Beyoncé and Jay-Z for having the most Grammy award nominations of all time – 80 to their 88 each – and is the awards’ third most-garlanded winner, with 28.

Among those paying tribute to Jones was Joe Biden, who called him a “musical genius who transformed the soul of America – one beat, one rhythm, and one rhyme at a time…”

Jones was born in Chicago. His half-white father had been born to a Welsh slave owner and one of his female slaves, while his mother’s family were also descended from slave owners. His introduction to music came through the walls of his childhood home from a piano played by a neighbour, which he started learning aged seven, and via his mother’s singing.

His parents divorced and he moved with his father to Washington state, where Jones learned drums and a host of brass instruments in his high-school band.

At 14, he started playing in a band with a 16-year-old Ray Charles in Seattle clubs, once, in 1948, backing Billie Holiday.

He studied music at Seattle University, transferring east to continue in Boston, and then moved to New York after being rehired by the jazz band leader Lionel Hampton, with whom he had toured as a high-schooler (a band for which Malcolm X was a heroin dealer when they played in Detroit).

He secured a job at Mercury Records and slowly paid off the debt with plenty of work as a producer and arranger for artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Sammy Davis Jr. He also began scoring films, his credits eventually including The Italian Job, In the Heat of the Night, The Getaway and The Colour Purple.