Quincy Jones was known to generations of fans due to a career that spanned from the radio to the big screen and the small.

For decades, he had many of the pop world’s best players on call — and knew how to coax out their sharpest performances.

The producer, who died this week, was at the height of his powers during a legendary three-album run with Jackson.

The music superproducer knew that if you have to find your way to a kind of telepathy with an artist, operating as one mind, you can’t speed past the human element.

Their work on “Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” and “Bad” set records for commercial success and defined the sound of the 1980s.

Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms.