RELEASED: 1 JANUARY 2003 / 26 MAY 2003
WE’RE ALL FAMILIAR with his fusions of funk, rock and soul, but jazz was always an essential part of Prince’s musical palette. The son of a Minneapolis jazz pianist, Prince could certainly bluff his way as a competent jazz piano player; while, as a guitarist, he could pastiche Wes Montgomery as well as he could Eddie Van Halen.
At gigs and rehearsals he’d often lead his bands through jazz standards - from Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” to Billy Cobham’s “Stratus” - and in the early 1990s his live shows would sometimes turn into full-on Duke Ellington pastiches, melding “Days Of Wild” with “Caravan” before going into an impromptu version of Ellington’s “Take The A Train” or Charlie Parker’s “Now’s The Time”. Pyrotechnic jazz solos are often embedded in his songs, from “Mountains” to “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker” to “La La La He He Hee”; while songs like “Do U Lie?”, “Strollin’” or “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore” all swing hard and feature some fine improvisations. He even jammed and recorded on several occasions with his obsessive admirer Miles Davis, who described Prince as “the Duke Ellington of the 1980s”.