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

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.

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.

The genre-hopping mastermind, who died this weekend at age 91, brought a singular style to his lengthy, hit-filled career that involved artists ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Michael Jackson and earned him dozens of Grammys.