At age 75, Quincy Jones should be satisfied with his astonishing path through music and his extraordinary achievements in civil rights. His production of Michael Jackson's Thriller will always be a benchmark, as will the pioneering long-form video of the title track that he oversaw. His arrangement of Frank Sinatra's Fly Me To The Moon is timeless and evocative. His Italian Job soundtrack still thrills. He produced The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. His Listen Up foundation has been behind the construction of homes in South Africa. Yet the Quincy Jones you know depends on when and where he cropped up.

As a gifted big band trumpeter and arranger, Jones could have been comfortable as a backroom figure. But he had a drive that must have come from his mother, a multilingual Boston University graduate who became a bank executive before succumbing to schizophrenia. In the late-40s, he met Count Basie and they remained friends until the bandleader's death. Lionel Hampton offered Jones a job before he'd left high school. In 1951, shortly after starting music school in Boston, another offer from Hampton was accepted. He was 18 and loose in New York. Bebop was jumping, but Jones began looking beyond jazz.

The mainstream pop world wasn't swimming with opportunities for black orchestrators, despite the lead of Duke Ellington's arranger Billy Strayhorn. So in 1957 Jones moved to France, where he worked with Michel Legrand and Charles Aznavour. In Paris, he studied with Olivier Messiaen and musical doyenne Nadia Boulanger. Jones wanted to learn how to arrange strings, which US record labels wouldn't let blacks do. He socialised with Picasso, Josephine Baker and author Françoise Sagan. There were no boundaries, no such thing as high or low art. In 2001, French president Jacques Chirac made Jones commander of the Légion d'honneur.

Back in New York in 1961, Jones became a staffer at Mercury Records and was soon the first black exec at a major label, working with Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. But his big-time crossover came with the whiter-than-white girl singer Lesley Gore. Jones' musical direction of It's My Party lent the song a drama that leapt out of radios, bringing him his first No 1 in June 1963. Jones' liner notes to Gore's first album describe her as "the five feet two, green-eyed princess of song."

Nineteen years later, Jones began working on Thriller with the future King Of Pop. The album redefined musical success by spending 36 weeks as the US No 1. It's doubtful whether they compared notes on Sagan, but the breadth of scope that Jones brought was crucial to Thriller's appeal.

It was classic polymathic Quincy Jones. Back in 1954 he'd told Down Beat magazine that, "A jazz musician can either be an artist and do progressive things or he can work on pleasing the people. I think a happy medium between the two can be reached." Musical cross-pollination might be de rigueur these days, but Quincy Jones set the template over 50 years ago.

· Quincy, Fri, 9pm, BBC4