The artist Prince called “indescribable” to work with
It’s quite easy to drift off into dreamland and fantasise about what would make the most incredible musical collaboration. Some of these may have come to fruition and been released for the world to hear, while others remain buried or lost to time.
These imaginary meetings of minds can be as far-fetched as you want them to be in your mind, combining the brilliance of two heavyweights in wildly different genres, or they could be based on the idea that the collaborators would intrinsically work well together and be able to play off each other’s strengths.
For example, would it not be great to hear what Prince and Miles Davis would be able to conjure up together? In a 1998 interview with Prince (known as the rather unpronounceable O(+> ‘love symbol’ at the time) for Guitar World, he divulged that jam sessions between the two greats did, in fact, happen.
When asked what some of his most memorable jam sessions over the years have been, he was quoted as saying: “I’ve actually recorded some indescribable music with Miles Davis—long improvisations that I will release at some point.”
With this interview having taken place seven years following Davis’ passing, it is unclear when these jams would have taken place, but it’s undeniable that they would have been some of the most mind-bending excursions into jazz, funk and psychedelic fusions imaginable due to both of their unrelenting visions of expanding musical horizons.
Davis, who is 32 years Prince’s senior, had already had a storied career before Prince entered the public eye, continually striving to shift the boundaries of what jazz could be. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he explored a world of jazz with orchestral influences on albums such as Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, making time in between to deliver his opus of modality on Kind of Blue.
This would later shift towards cosmic jazz fusion on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew in the 1960s and ’70s before jumping ship again in favour of psychedelic funk on On the Corner and Get Up With It. Throughout this time, Davis was working with some of the most acclaimed names in the world of jazz and beyond, from the likes of Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley in the earlier years to Chick Corea and John McLaughlin on the later fusion records.
Prince didn’t come onto the scene until 1978, by which time Davis had begun to slow down in his output, but in many ways, bore the torch that the trumpeter and bandleader had carried for so long by regularly searching for new ways to innovate and change his sound. A pioneer of the ‘Minneapolis sound’ in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he himself explored the worlds of funk and disco on early records before venturing into psychedelic rock and pop on classic records such as Purple Rain and Sign o’ The Times and later becoming an early adopter of the sound that would shape modern R&B.
Both incredible composers and masters of making a marvel out of the most rudimentary jam sessions, it would have been a delight to hear what the two of them would have come up with together in the studio, though this remains to be seen. When asked whether these will ever see the light of day, Prince continued by saying, “I want to wait until the spirit moves me, you know. Bring those recordings to the public when it feels right. Like release it on his birthday or his death day, when Miles was released from the circle of life and death.”
With both now no longer with us, both have seen posthumous releases come to light, but knowing how prolific both were whilst alive, it could be a while before these sessions are retrieved from the archives.
