To begin to appreciate what Quincy Jones meant to American popular music, listen to Frank Sinatra’s 1964 recording of “Fly Me to the Moon” with the Count Basie Orchestra swinging behind him. Then listen to the relentless bass line of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” part of 1982’s “Thriller,” the biggest-selling pop album in history. And then listen to “We Are the World,” the 1985 charity single in which superstars obediently sang backup for megastars and no one dared disobey the maestro’s baton.

The maestro was Jones, who died on Sunday at 91. It is hard to think of any individual who had a bigger role, over the course of my lifetime, in shaping the soundscape - as a producer, arranger, conductor and musician.

From bebop to hip-hop and beyond, Jones was always there, using his magical ears to fine-tune a record until it couldn’t possibly sound any better.

Born on Chicago’s South Side in 1933, Jones grew up amid the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression. His mother suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized; his stepmother, he has said, was cruel. During the wartime boom, his father found a job at a naval base in Washington state; it was there, near Seattle, where Jones broke into a recreation center and first touched a piano.

“Every drop of blood in my body said, ‘This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’ … And it saved my life,” Jones told Dr. Dre on the rap impresario’s radio show.

Jones quickly learned to play an assortment of instruments, including piano and drums, but his favorite was trumpet. By 15, he was good enough for swing-era bandleader and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton to invite him on tour - an idea nixed by Hampton’s wife, who insisted that Jones finish school first.

He eventually did play with Hampton, and with Basie, and with Dizzy Gillespie. But what made Jones unique was his ability to change with the times and achieve fluency, then mastery, in new musical genres.

When he took a job as an executive at Mercury Records in the early 1960s, it was predictable that he would bring to the label a roster of jazz luminaries. But who, except Jones, would listen to a demo tape by an unknown 16-year-old pop singer named Lesley Gore and hear something special in her voice that others hadn’t noticed? He quickly signed her up, and her iconic single, “It’s My Party,” became a No. 1 hit.

Eventually, Jones worked with everybody who was anybody in music. Ray Charles was a dear friend. Sinatra gave him the nickname “Q.” Sarah Vaughan was among the many jazz greats who performed at a 1974 concert in Jones’s honor, after he suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm - an episode that ended his career as a trumpeter, on doctors’ orders, but seemed only to turbocharge his work as a producer and arranger.

In 1978, Jones was brought on as musical supervisor for the film version of “The Wiz,” and, for the first time, worked with Jackson. Over the next decade, they would collaborate on three albums - “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” - that are landmarks in pop music history.

When I heard that Jackson was working with Jones on an album. I wondered whether the resulting product would be too jazzy, too slickly produced. But what they created transcended genre.

The sonic elements Jones combined in the “Off the Wall” title track, for example, would have sounded busy and overdone in a lesser producer’s hands - ethereal harmonies, synthesizers, everything but the kitchen sink. But somehow, it comes off just right

Jones never lost the propulsive drive of the bass and drums and never lost the funk. He put Jackson in the context of the whole history of Black American music, back to the blues and beyond, all the way to the African-language chanting and clapping at the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” - with Jackson’s falsetto yelps completing the call-and-response.

Jones applied not one iota less artistry and craft to Jackson’s recordings as he had to Sinatra’s or Basie’s. And he had the gift not just to understand new musical vocabularies but to master them. What other survivor from the golden age of jazz would decide to punctuate Jackson’s “Beat It” with a shredding guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen?

If Q called, nobody said no. Only Jones, the sun in his own musical solar system, could have convened the multiple of performers who assembled in 1985 to record “We Are the World,” an effort to raise funds for African nations suffering famine. What do Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Paul Simon, Dionne Warwick, Lionel Richie, Al Jarreau, Stevie Wonder and Waylon Jennings have in common? They all came to sing, and to take instruction, when Jones asked.

Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist.