Quincy Jones says he 'wouldn't work with' Elvis Presley because he 'was a racist'

Quincy Jones told The Hollywood Reporter's Seth Abramovitch that he received "an intervention" from his daughters after his brutally honest and viral Vulture interview in 2018, but "Loose Lips Quincy Jones" is at it again.

Abramovitch's conversation with the 88-year-old musical legend was as winding as seemingly any conversation with Jones, touching on anything from his Zodiac sign to meeting Charlie Parker with $17 to his name in 1951, but this exchange about Elvis Presley was particularly eyebrow-raising:

How did you meet Michael Jackson?

When he was 12 at Sammy Davis’ house, and he told me when we decided to do [The Wiz], he says, "I need you to help me find a producer. I’m getting ready to do my first solo album.”

What was he like on the set of The Wiz?

He knew how to do his homework, whether it was with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly or whoever, James Brown. He was doing some Elvis copying, too. “The King of Pop,” man. Come on!

Did you ever work with Elvis?

No. I wouldn’t work with him.

Why not?

I was writing for [orchestra leader] Tommy Dorsey, oh God, back then in the ’50s. And Elvis came in, and Tommy said, “I don’t want to play with him.” He was a racist mother—I’m going to shut up now. But every time I saw Elvis, he was being coached by [“Don’t Be Cruel” songwriter] Otis Blackwell, telling him how to sing. [Blackwell told David Letterman in 1987 that he and Presley had never met.]

Jones has won 28 Grammy Awards—receiving 80 total nominations—and his most recent came at the 61st Grammy Awards in February 2019 for Quincy under the best music film category. Jones has also been nominated for seven Oscars (The Color Purple, The Wiz), winning the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 67th Academy Awards.

This is all an elongated way of Jones is an EGOT winner, though he is in a special category away from the 16 honorees typically associated with the achievement because his Oscar came through a humanitarian or lifetime achievement award.

Technicality aside, Jones's life and career is in now way cheapened—especially after the context he gave Abramovitch as to what he had to overcome as a Black man in Hollywood during the 1960s:

"They called me to do Gregory Peck’s Mirage [in 1965] and I came out here. I was dressed in my favorite suit, and the producer came out to meet me at Universal. He stopped in his tracks—total shock—and he went back and told [music supervisor] Joe Gershenson, 'You didn't tell me Quincy Jones was a Negro.' They didn’t use Black composers in films. They only used three-syllable Eastern European names, Bronislaw Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin. It was very, very racist. I remember I would be at Universal walking down the hall, and the guys would say, 'Here comes a shvartze' in Yiddish, and I know what that means. It’s like the N-word. And Truman Capote, I did In Cold Blood, man. He called [director] Richard Brooks up, he said, 'Richard, I can’t understand you using a Negro to write music to a film with no people of color in it.' Richard said, 'F— you, he's doing the score.' I did, and I got nominated for an Oscar."

 Read the full interview here.