The album was not just the fulfilment of Jackson’s talent, but the culmination of Jones’s career, as he used his peerless musical expertise to define the 1980s with a sleek and polished fusion of R&B and pop.
Jones listened to 600 songs (he sometimes said 800) to decide which nine should go on the album, and employed a dream team of musicians and songwriters that he had been assembling over the years.
His choice of collaborators was one example of his knack for knowing how to make a good song great. For Beat It, he thought the single needed a rockier edge, so he recruited Eddie Van Halen to contribute a guitar solo. Legend has it that the solo was so explosive that a speaker caught fire in the studio.
And when it came to the title track, Jones didn’t like the original name Starlight, so he asked its writer, Rod Temperton, to come up with something different. Temperton renamed it Thriller and recast it with a spooky theme. Jones topped it off by asking his wife’s friend, horror actor Vincent Price, to record a spoken-word outro.
The album earned Jones and Jackson the Grammy Award for producer of the year, while Thriller was named album of the year and Beat It won record of the year.
Jones used his winning formula in the 1980s with George Benson, Donna Summer and Patti Austin, and produced the decade’s best-selling single when Jackson and Lionel Richie assembled 35 of America’s biggest names for the 1985 charity song We Are the World.
Jones famously posted a message on the studio entrance telling the stars: “Check your egos at the door”.
He had further success under his own name with his albums The Dude and Back on the Block. The latter, released in 1989, featured an all-star cast including many friends from his early career like Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles.
But as well as revisiting his past, he was also firmly in the present, enlisting rappers like Ice-T and Grandmaster Melle Mel to appear on the title track.
It earned Jones another album of the year award at the Grammys.
Although he was in his 50s, he embraced rap music because he saw similarities with the energy of bebop jazz, and because may of its stars had risen out of hardship on the streets.
“I feel a kinship there because we went through a lot of the same stuff,” he said.
And rap stars reciprocated his affection, looking on Jones as an inspirational elder statesman of black American music. Kendrick Lamar and Dr Dre were awestruck when meeting him for the Netflix documentary, which was titled Quincy and directed by his daughter, the actress Rashida Jones.