NEW YORK (AP) — Quincy Jones was among six musicians named as National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters for 2008.

The 2008 Jazz Masters were announced Tuesday night at a ceremony hosted by NEA Chairman Dana Gioia at the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue named after trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who was among the first group of Jazz Masters in 1982.

The award, the nation's highest jazz honor, has now gone to 100 leading figures in jazz.

The 74-year-old Jones began his career as an 18-year-old trumpeter playing small gigs in Seattle with Ray Charles and went on to become a groundbreaking conductor, arranger, record producer and film composer.

The NEA cited him as being ''a renaissance man of music'' and honored him in the bandleader category. (Jones could not attend the ceremony because of his busy schedule, but will accept his plaque at a special awards concert during the annual International Association for Jazz Education conference in January in Toronto, Gioia said.)

Pianist Andrew Hill was posthumously named in the pianist-keyboardist category. Hill, whose innovative compositions gained wider recognition late in his career with the release of such albums as ''Passing Ships'' (2003) and ''Time Lines'' (2006), was informed of the honor shortly before his death in April of lung cancer at age 75, Gioia said.

''This was the last tribute that he would receive in his lifetime,'' said Hill's widow, Joanne Robinson Hill, in accepting the award. ''He considered it to be a very great and precious honor.''

Candido Camero (rhythm instrumentalist) was cited by the NEA for being the first percussionist to bring conga drumming to jazz through his work with Gillespie and Stan Kenton in the 1950s. The 86-year-old Camero became only the second Cuban-born musician to be named a Jazz Master, following saxophonist-clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera in 2005.

''I wish to thank God for allowing me to enjoy this realization of the American dream,'' said Camero.