Frank Sinatra and Quincy Jones created a wonderful relationship on stage and in the studio, built on mutual respect and appreciation.

Quincy Jones, a trumpeter from Chicago, rose to prominence in the 1950s as an arranger and conductor for Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan, but it was his work with Frank Sinatra that catapulted him to international prominence.

In June 1958, Frank Sinatra and Quincy Jones collaborated for the first time to collect funds for the United Nations Refugee Fund. Jones, who achieved success in Europe before achieving it at home, was working for Barclay Records in Paris when he received a phone call from the office of Princess Grace of Monaco requesting that he organize an orchestra for a concert at the principality’s Sporting Club. Jones gathered 55 musicians and put them on a train down to the French Riviera, ecstatic at the possibility of working with one of his musical idols.

On their initial encounter, Sinatra gave him minimal instructions. “He didn’t say more than ten sentences to me the whole time,” Jones recalled. “He walked into rehearsal, hit me with those steely blues, and said, ‘You’ve heard the records; you know what to do.'”

Though the concert was a success (Sinatra complimented Jones, saying, “Yeah, nice job, Q”), the duo would not work together again for another six years. In 1964, Sinatra called Jones unexpectedly to ask if he could arrange and direct a studio session he was performing with Count Basie and his band.

Jones was impressed with Sinatra’s professionalism and work ethic in the studio and saw firsthand the singer’s genuine affection for big-band music and the musicians who made it possible. “Sinatra had approached working with a big band as an almost religious experience and treated it with profound respect,” recalled the arranger, “since his days with Tommy Dorsey and Harry James in bands where the instrumentalists were the stars and the singers were the relief team.”

The Quincy Jones-arranged recordings were published as It Might As Well Be Swing and contained the immediate hit “Fly Me To The Moon.” Working with Sinatra catapulted Jones to new heights, as he admitted in 2001: “Looking back, that call from Frank was a major turning point in my career and my life.”

During the recordings, the singer and arranger became friends—Sinatra even surprised Jones one morning by preparing him breakfast—and their friendship lasted until Sinatra’s death in 1998. Jones looked up to Sinatra as a mentor. “Frank was my persona. “He was hip, straight up, and straight ahead, and above all, a monster musician,” he said in his memoir, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, published in 2001.

Sinatra and the Basie band reconnected in 1966 for Sinatra’s first live album, Sinatra At The Sands, recorded in Las Vegas, but it would be nearly two decades before they worked again in the studio when Sinatra produced his final solo album, 1984’s LA Is My Lady. Jones gathered the film’s star-studded supporting ensemble. The 51-year-old arranger was the hottest record producer on the globe at the time, having directed Michael Jackson’s 1982 smash hit Thriller.

Looking back on his association with Sinatra in 2001, Jones lavished respect on the man who gave him the moniker Q. “Frank introduced me to a new world. “A land of dreams, high living, and making music that we both loved,” he explained.

“No one mentions the five-hundred-dollar tips, the unbridled generosity, the mortgages, and funeral bills he paid off for down-and-out performers, the loan of his plane to take a very sick Joe Louis to his heart specialists in Texas,” Jones said of Sinatra. “That’s the essence of him.”