26th December 1985.

Prince records a song called Can I Play With U? for Miles Davis at Sunset Sound Studio in L.A.

Prince was asked to submit a track for Davis' first album for WB, entitled Perfect Way but eventually titled Tutu.

Apparently, Davis became fond of prince around the time of Around The World In A Day, and was keen for prince to contribute to his album. The idea was that if Davis liked the track, Prince could write more material for him.

Eric Leeds provided saxaphone overdubs to the track, then an instrumental and a vocal version of Can I Play With U? were sent to Davis in early January '86. Davis is said to have liked the track and added his trumpet in February, keyboard and bass parts were also added by members of Davis' band. It is said that all were pleased with helping a collaboration between Davis and Prince, though no one was pleased with the way that Can I Play With You? turned out.

When Prince heard some other material that Davis had recorded for the album he decided that his track would not work on the album, and Can I Play With U? was shelved without argument.

24th March 1987.

Miles Davis arrived in Minneapolis to play a show at The Orpheum Theatre on the 25th. Prince's idea was for Davis to arrive a few days early in order for them to hang out. However, Davis was appearing on the Soul Train tv show in L.A on the 23rd, and felt that a round trip would be too tiring. Instead, he arrived in Minneapolis on the 24th, the day before his show.

Prince and Eric Leeds were working on an instrumental track when Davis dropped by the studio, (Prince was still using the warehouse studio/rehearsal space?) Davis was asked to join in on a Sign O The Times rehearsal that was underway, but Davis had left his trumpet at his hotel.

Later that night, Prince hosted a dinner at his house for davis, Eric Leeds, Sheila E and Prince's father John L Nelson. Afterwards they spent time in Prince's home studio listening to tracks that Prince thought Davis might be interested in working on. There was no recording done during Davis' visit. Prince gave Davis a tape with three songs, Movie Star, Witness 4 The Prosecution, and Chocolate. Davis added Movie Star into his live show but nothing was done in the studio with any of the songs.

25th March 1987.

Miles davis performs at The Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis. Prince and most of his band attend the show. Prince entered and exited the show under a hooded cloak when houselights were low.

[Edited 9/5/10 16:38pm]

31st December 1987.

Prince plays a new year benefit show at Paisley Park Studios in aid of the homeless. During the near two hour performance Miles Davis walked on stage five minutes into a jam filled 35 minute version of It's Gonna Be A beautiful Night. Davis added rhythmic phrases and also a solo for a few minutes.

[img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/milespr.jpg[/img:$uid] Davis at Paisley.

13th November 1989.

Prince recorded a song for Miles Davis. he used samples of Davis' trumpet from existing records and produced a long funk jam entitled Funky. The track is said to have been prince's suggestion to Davis as to what direction his music may take. Davis was sent a copy of the track but failed to interest Davis with it.

[Edited 9/5/10 17:05pm]

21st January 1991.

Prince sends three instrumental tracks to Miles Davis. Penetration, Jailbait and A Girl And Her Puppy. The three tracks were leftovers from the Madhouse album 24, originally titled 17(Penetration), 19(Jailbait) and 20(A Girl And Her Puppy). The recordings were nearly complete and Prince's idea was for Davis to add trumpet to the ones he liked.

Davis taught the three tracks to his band but never added trumpet to Prince's recordings. Davis instead, re-recorded the tracks with his own band. The rough mixes were then sent back to Prince for his approval and possible input. Davis then began to play the three tracks live.

28th September 1991.

Miles Davis dies.

30th September 1991.

Prince records the instrumental track Letter 4 Miles in memory of Miles Davis.

Michael Bland played drums on the session.

After the death of Miles Davis, Prince was approached by WB as they wanted to include his Can I Play With You? on Davis' first posthumous album Doo Bop. They felt that it would be appropriate to include the one existing collaboration between Davis and prince. The three Madhouse tracks were also considered for the Davis album if Prince agreed to do some post production work on them.

Prince however, refused, he is said to have not been interested in something that did not show Miles Davis at his best.

Interesting.

Great thread.

http://thelastmiles.com/i...-leeds.php

Interview: Alan Leeds

During the last ten years of his life, Miles collaborated with many artists including, George Duke, Toto, Paolo Rustichelli, Shirley Horn and Scritti Politti. But the collaboration that captured the most imagination was that with Prince. Miles performed a number of Prince's songs on-stage, recorded a Prince tune that was due to appear on Miles's first album for Warner Bros, was going to record a bunch of Prince songs for the album that became Doo-Bop and Miles even appears with Prince on a track with Chaka Khan ("Sticky Wicked" on the album CK). But like the long-hoped for collaboration between Miles and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s, Miles and Prince never got to work together in a studio on an album. It's not even certain whether they ever performed together in a studio.

Miles had great respect for Prince and vice-versa and Miles once said that Prince could even be the Duke Ellington of his time. Such is the importance of this musical link that my book, The Last Miles, devotes a whole chapter to Miles and Prince.

The man who introduced Prince to Miles was Alan Leeds. Alan has had a remarkable career in the music industry. He was James Brown's road manager for over four years in the 1970s and was co-writer of the liner notes for the highly acclaimed James Brown anthology Star Time - Alan shared a Grammy award for the notes.

Alan also worked with Prince from 1983 to 1992 as tour manager and later, head of Paisley Park Studios. And there's another Prince connection, as Alan's brother - Eric Leeds - played saxophone in Prince's band and played on the Prince/Miles collaborations. Alan is also a serious Miles fan and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his music. In this excusive interview with The Last Miles.com, Alan describes the relationship between Miles and Prince and talks about the number of occasions when they got close to actually working together on an album.

Alan Leeds. Photo courtesy and © Alan Leeds

TheLastMiles.com: Alan, can we start by looking at your background?

Alan Leeds: I was in born in Jackson Heights, January 26 1947. For some reason I became a fan of black music. Most of my family's taste was in classical music but my father also had his share of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and stuff like that. It was through that that I was introduced to the ensemble of black music. Then I would see people like Louis Armstrong on TV. God knows why, but I took to the music. Very early on I had very segregated musical tastes and if it wasn't black, it didn't count! And even when I got a little older and into rock and roll, it was like "well Elvis is okay, but this guy Little Richard is a little more fascinating!"

My uncle happened to be the programme director of WINS radio in New York, which was at that time - mid to late fifties - the leading rock and roll station. As the programme director he had tons of spare records and he would gather records from the radio library that they didn't need - either because they were duplicates or records they had no intention of playing. So he'd gather up all these 45s and send them to us. So I'm this ten, twelve year-old getting a box of hundred records every month and of course it made very popular with the kids on the block! But it also exposed me to all kinds of records that weren't necessarily on the radio. A lot of them were records that were only on black radio or were not on the radio at all. So I would get records by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf that were on exotic labels and you just wanted to put them on.

TLM: What about your education?

AL: I was an okay student and was blessed with a kind of brain where I could get by without applying myself too hard. So I managed to get through college and do two half years as a journalism major. Most of my growing up was spent either playing baseball or listening to music - I was obsessed with records. As I got to older, my family moved to Richmond, Virginia and ended up working part-time in a black radio station [WANT] in Virginia, which was another oddity! I was attracted to fact that this station played the music I liked. Through a quirk of fate I met one of the disc jockeys, who was a black guy who was in college - this was around '62, '63. We took to each other. I was managing a small local band and used this to talk to the DJ about utilising the studio to rehearse the band, but it was really all an angle to get into the station and try to get access to the record library! I reasoned that if my uncle's station had extra records, maybe this one did too! Lo and behold, they had a record library that was in complete disarray and so I volunteered to become their part-time librarian and they bought it. That led to being a disc jockey on the station, first part-time and then full-time.

Alan Leeds then... Photo courtesy and © Alan Leeds

I wasn't really committed to radio. I loved the fact that people were paying me for sitting down and playing records - after all, that's what I doing at home for free - but I didn't have any aspirations of being a life-long broadcaster - the fascination was with the music and not the medium. But the radio station I worked for promoted a lot of the rhythm and blues acts that came through Virginia and in those days, Richmond was a major stop on the Chitlin circuit, so all of the legendary R & B stars of the 1960s - Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, James Brown, Sam Cooke - came through town on a regular basis. I used the radio station as leverage to meet artists, agents and management, and it was clear to me that I wanted to be part of that - this was where I wanted to spend my life. As exciting as records were, it didn't match the excitement of a concert, where the curtain would go up and thousands of people would scream and this incredible music would come to life.

Being in the right place at the right time, I went on to form some relationships, one of which was with James. The idea was that I would volunteer to interview these guys - either backstage, or at their hotel or wherever they were available to be interviewed. I would play the interviews over the air, help plug their records and promote the ticket sales for the shows, so it was a win-win for everybody. The rest of the guys weren't as aggressive as I was - they didn't have the passion I had about the music. They were trying to get home to their wives or girlfriends and I was trying to get to the hotel and interview James Brown!

James Brown - Star Time

TLM: What was your take on James Brown?

AL: For some reason James Brown took to me and vice-versa. I was already a number one James Brown fan. If there had been a competition to find the number one James brown fan I defy anybody to take me on - I would have won hands down.

TLM: What was your first meeting with James Brown like?

AL: It was crazy! I came to a hotel room and I had heard about his temperament, that he was a highly strung, unpredictable guy, who was very impulsive and reactionary. He could be the sweetest guy one day and jump down your throat the next. I was really very timid. Of all of the guys I met back then, he was the one that intimidated me the most, because I was just a fanatic.

It was '65, so I'd be eighteen. A very attractive woman answered the door and seemed taken aback that it was a pimply-faced white kid - I don't think she expected that! I explained who I was and I had this heavy tape recorder with me. It was the middle of the summer and I was probably soaked with sweat. She invited me in and I sat in the living room for about five or ten minutes and then she came in and said 'Mr Brown will see you now.' I expected him to walk out but she escorted me into the bedroom. It was the afternoon and he had a show that night and he was lying in bed.

All I saw - and it's a vision I have that's just as clear today - was white sheets and a whole mass of white pillows propped up against the headboard and on the pillows was all this hair - I didn't even see his face, it was just hair! I introduced myself and we sat and chatted and he made me feel like the biggest thing in radio since Dick Clark or something. He just had this way if disarming you. Of course, this was a guy who was a master promoter and a guy who befriended people and anyone who could help him. He was just beginning to crossover into the mainstream - he had released "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" - and I think that the phenomenon of white media giving him attention was something I think he was enjoying, even though ironically I was representing the black media.

James Brown - Gravity

He took to me and spent way more time than he had to and he did some drops [promos] for my radio show and some little promos way beyond the call of duty and we chatted about the industry at large - we chatted more off-mike than on. He wasn't treating my like a Johnny-Come-Lately - he was treating me like an industry veteran. I was just on cloud nine - "this guy is treating me like a big shot and I'm just a nobody!" Of course, years later I realised that was how he treated anybody on radio and that his attitude was today's new disc jockey could be the programme director a year from now. He treated disc jockeys like that in every city, who also felt they were special. Unless that is, you didn't play his records, in which case, you met the other side of James Brown! I got to the point where whenever the James Brown Show was appearing within a hundred miles of me, I was in my car and chasing the band. So I would see him almost once or twice a month. As a result I became a familiar figure backstage and because the boss liked me, everybody tolerated me! I'm sure a lot of guys in the band and the entourage were trying to figure out this scrawny little white kid was! Some of them became friends.

In 1969, he was having a problem in Pittsburgh, which I had moved to and was going to college. I got a call from one of his agents, who said 'we're having a problem with the local radio station promoting the show, and we need a local promoter. James suggested calling you to see if you had time to help us with the show, can you help?' Of course, this was the call I had been waiting all my life. I did it and the show sold out and I got offered the job. So I quit school and went to work for James Brown. And after four or five hectic years of that, I'm in the business now.

TLM: How did you meet up with Prince?

AL: We're now talking early 80s and I had become a freelance tour manager and I was on the road with Kiss of all people. The tour was winding down and one of the production people came up to me and said 'what are you going to do after this?' and I said 'I don't know.' He said, there's a vacancy on the Prince tour that was halfway through'. The word was out that Prince was difficult to work for and I guess he'd been through two or three tour managers on this particular tour. This guy had a contact with Prince's management who asked if I was interested in leaping over to the Prince tour. I just looked at it as another job opportunity, so I said "Yes." We kind of hit it off and at the end of the tour I went home - by now I'd moved back to New York. About three months after the tour ended I got a call from his management asking me if I would be willing to relocate to

Minneapolis because they going to do a movie and a new album and had all these activities scheduled that sounded overly ambitious and unrealistic to me. But they were determined to make it worth my while, so I did. And of course Purple Rain came out and I realised they how right they were. It was another case of being in the right place at the right time. I worked for Prince from '83 to '92 and arguably, if you were going to work for Prince, they were the years to be there. Purple Rain blew up and he eventually built Paisley Park Studios and became the industry he was for about ten years there.

TLM: Tutu engineer Peter Doell talked about how incredible it was that Prince could compose, play, record and mix a new song in a day.

AL: The description is absolutely right - it was a phenomenal experience watching him do that. He has a very anal kind of compulsion to finish things. I suppose you could look at some of his records and say they could have benefited from a little more time, sonically as well as creatively, in some cases. But his genius was in that he would get an idea and just couldn't rest to the degree of burning out engineers. He was an engineer's nightmare because he had no patience with the technology - just waiting for them to rewind tape was tedious for him, even to the point where he would yell at them and say 'can't you make that move a little faster?'

Prince And The Revolution - Purple Rain

I don't know if he's the same now or whether he's calmed down with age. But he was incredibly prolific and compulsive about finishing things. It wasn't unusual for him to get an idea for a song and go downstairs at mid-day and start, and by nine or ten at night, come up with a rough mix of a finished song. And when you consider that he does it all himself and that a finished song represent countless overdubs of various instruments, not to mention the adjustment because the composing is part of the process. Half the time he'd have the lyric and the song would just evolve as he was working - it was pretty amazing. But he couldn't rest. He's not the kind of guy who say 'okay I'm going to lay down a drum track and bass track and go live with it for two days - the live with it part just wasn't in his vocabulary.

TLM: Where did you get your love for the music of Miles?

AL: Back in my Richmond days I was completely obsessed with R&B and wasn't listening to much jazz. My Dad exposed me to the bands that he liked and as a kid I would go see Duke Ellington or Count Basie and enjoyed them tremendously and even had one or two records in my collection. But in terms of any modern jazz, I didn't go out of my way to expose myself to it. But I met a friend who worked in a record shop who was a real jazz-head and he was the kind of guy to turn me onto new things. He exposed me methodically to modern jazz, which falls into the hard bop category. He turned me on to Cannonball Adderley first and then onto Miles and Monk and Mingus and so on. The first Miles record I ever bought was the album with Hank Mobley on sax [Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall]. Gradually I went back and got Kind of Blue. I wasn't into the second quintet - I wasn't open minded enough at the time to appreciate them. But if you ask me now what's my favourite Miles stuff it's the Coltrane quintet, the Wayne Shorter/Herbie Hancock quintet and then I make a leap and go to Agharta. While I love the Isle of Wight and the Keith Jarrett and the Bitches Brew stuff, if I'm going to play any post 1960s band I'm going to play Agharta. That funk band was amazing. I think that band [with Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on guitar, Michael Henderson on bass, Al Foster on drums, Mtume on percussion, Sonny Fortune on sax and Miles playing wah-wah trumpet and organ] was Miles's greatest casting.

TLM: How did Prince view Miles?

AL: Eric joined the band in the middle of the Purple Rain tour and quickly became friends with [guitarist] Wendy Melvoin and [keyboardist] Lisa Coleman, who were familiar with jazz. Gradually they began turning Prince into this kind of music- he had little first hand knowledge of jazz. This was during 1984/85. They made it their own project of turning Prince onto different kinds of music. Eric would give him jazz records and turned Prince on to Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue and other stuff. Gradually the three of them had an impact on Prince and he felt that he needed to know this music and figure out what he liked and didn't like. He had a very genuine interest in expanding his musical curiosity. Young black guys were attracted to Miles because of his politics - he was an icon. I think as Prince learnt more about Miles he started to see some of himself in Miles. He was fascinated with Miles and used to ask Eric about stories about Miles and he'd share recordings with him. He'd show him video recordings and Prince would be fascinated and say 'look at the way Miles is standing.' - he was just studying his moves or his posture. There was a real fascination with the iconic aspect of Miles.

TLM: Can you describe the first time they met?

AL: To my knowledge, it was at Los Angeles airport and according to my diaries it was December 7 1985. I was with Prince and we had been in San Francisco and were flying back to LA. We got off the plane and were walking to baggage airside and towards where Prince's driver was waiting. And as we were walking through baggage claim I spotted Miles Davis and I poked Prince in the ribs and pointed. I introduced myself and it ended up with Prince getting into Miles's car, which was parked a little in front of his. I didn't get in with him and they sat and chatted for twenty minutes or so and swapped phone numbers. Prior to this, Miles had signed with Warner Bros and I'm sure there had been some conversation with Warner executives about the possibility of him doing something with Miles. We knew Miles had aspirations beyond the jazz category, and so it was a no-brainer to think 'We've got Miles and Prince under one roof, let's get them together.' It just made perfect sense. Prince had recently discovered Miles's music and his history and had a kind of falling in love with him as an icon to the same level as James Brown. He even began with Eric's help to rearrange some of the music, putting in jazz-based segues. There was actually a break between two of Prince's song where they would do "Now Is The Time".

Madhouse. The first jazz-influenced album Prince and Eric Leeds recorded together

That led to Prince and Eric doing this Madhouse album [a jazz-influenced project]. So all of sudden Prince decided this was the music he should spend a little time on and thus began a second Madhouse album. So all of this was in the orbit when Miles intersects with the camp. The jazz radar was at its peak in the Prince camp when Miles intersected with the camp

[In late 1985, Prince composed and played on a tune for Miles called "Can I Play With U?" which Miles recorded]

TLM: Can you explain how "Can I Play With U?" happened?

AL: I'm basing this on my files and Eric's journals and his recollections. Shortly after the meeting at the airport, they swapped numbers and I'm sure they talked about Prince submitting some material for the first Warner Bros album. As I said, there might even have been conversations before they met Tommy LiPuma [then head of Warner Bros jazz] and the Warner Bros people. So it was already in our mind that 'Miles was on Warner and you guys are going to end up doing something together.' Now, they've met and swapped numbers, it was more imminent. And once Prince has got a passion for something, he jumps right on it.

Within a couple of weeks, Prince was in the studio and he recorded the initial track was on the 26th and 27th of December 1985. Eric was in Florida on holiday with our parents and he got a call from Prince saying 'hey you gotta come round here.' Prince did the basic track on the 26th and Eric overdubbed his horn on the 27th. Eric recalls Prince intending to take the tape to Miles in Malibu and Prince said to Eric; "I'm going to take this tape to Miles in Malibu. Do you want to go?' And Eric was well up for it! I don't know why, but that meeting never happened but they sent the tape by messenger. In January [1986] Prince sent the multi-track tape to Miles for him to do whatever overdubs he wanted to do. This didn't happen until February and March. Prince was never present at any of those overdub sessions - he had absolutely nothing to do with them. He was enamoured with Miles but I don't know how ambitious Prince was about working with Miles.

TLM: It seems that Miles always wanted greater collaboration but Prince never seemed to countenance them working together in a studio on an album. Why was this?

AL: First of all, you're dealing with two people who are control freaks. And if Miles is a control freak, multiply that five when you come to Prince! As enamoured as he was with Miles, it was never to the extent that he wanted to sacrifice his control. By the same token, there was Prince's MO [modus operandi] of producing other people - by then he had produced Chaka Khan, George Clinton, Patti Labelle - throughout his career. His idea is not the standard producer/artist relationship He just simply writes and produces a track that he thinks would be good for an artist and then he's willing if necessary to supervise the vocal overdub in the case of singers, but he doesn't really like to do that. He's uncomfortable directing other artists that he respects. He doesn't see himself in the role of a traditional producer, whose job is to bring out the essence of what the artist is. With Prince it's a matter of 'This is how I do it and here's how you could fit in. Give it a shot and see if you fit in.' But he's not going to change what he does to fit the artist, so in that sense he's really not a producer, at least of other people. And I think he realises that about himself, that lack of flexibility of as a producer.

And Eric reminded me of a quote -and here I'm paraphrasing - he remembers Prince saying to him 'I can't imagine what it would be like to tell Miles what to do.' In other words, 'I wouldn't want anybody telling me what to do, so how dare I tell the great Miles Davis what to do.' So the idea of being in a studio with Miles and trying to direct him was foreign to him and he just couldn't even conceive of that scenario. The irony was that Miles would have welcomed it and that's what we were trying to get through to Prince. Unlike Prince, Miles was somebody who was open to that and who would be interested in seeing where you would take him. Miles had the spirit of adventure to be wide open to see what it would be like for you to direct him as a producer. It was really all about Prince being completely intimidated at being in that role and how he really couldn't understand someone being in that role.

TLM: Prince pulled the track from the album.

AL: I remember Prince's reaction when he got the tape back - he wasn't enthralled with it. Not so much because of what Miles had done with it. But he just lived with the song long enough and realised that there wasn't really anything brilliant about it. It was something that had been hastily and impulsively done. I feel certain that Prince felt that if there was going to be a collaboration that was officially released, it should be something more significant than what that track was. That wasn't a reflection of Miles's playing, but more about the composition and the significance of the quality of the track in itself. He seemed to lose interest in that track and the fact that album ended up going in a different direction [Marcus Miller took charge of the album that became Tutu]. I think if Tommy LiPuma or Miles had gone back to Prince and said 'look this track isn't great. Let's do more and let's make an album together,' I think Prince would have probably submitted twenty tracks. I don't think it would have changed his MO or his willingness to spend a lot of time in the studio together, but I think he would have been interested in submitting tons of tracks in the hope of making an album. But that didn't happen. Whether he was hurt by that, I don't know, but I know he just seemed to lose interest.

TLM: What happened after that?

AL: They stayed in touch with occasional phone calls back and forth. There were a lot of invitations back and forth, where we would have shows on the West Coast and Prince would say 'call Miles,' but Miles would either be on the road or unavailable. We were invited to Miles's birthday party in May 1986 but we couldn't make it. By now I'd become a good friend of Gordon Meltzer [Miles's road manager] and so Prince would suggest I call Gordon or Miles. Prince was loath to give out his number and I was one of a couple of people who would handle most of his calls. So, whenever Miles was trying to find Prince, he'd call. Sometimes I'd come back from the grocery store and there'd be this raspy voice on the answer machine saying "tell that little purple motherfucker to contact me!"

Prince

TLM: Miles and Prince met in 1987?

AL: Prince asked Miles if he could come to the studio and hang out and maybe come over for dinner. As it happened Miles was available. It was a few months before Paisley Park Studios was open and so we were working in a large industrial warehouse. I remember picking up Miles at the hotel and driving him to the warehouse and Prince was rehearsing his band. Miles hung out at the rehearsal but didn't bring his horn - he didn't play with the band. Miles hung out for a few hours and Prince then had Miles over for dinner. Prince invited his father, who had been a local jazz pianist. He was an extremely eccentric player - I think he styled himself as a local wannabee Thelonius Monk! Prince also invited Sheila E, who was the drummer in his band and my brother.

Eric says it was one of the oddest dinners he'd ever had! It wasn't exactly tense, but it wasn't exactly casual! There was so much tip-toeing. Eric says it was like two boxers feeling each other out. At one point Miles turned to Prince's Dad and said 'So you're a musician too?' And Prince's Dad says: 'I was a piano player but always saw myself as [saxophonist] Lucky Thompson.' Miles replied 'what the fuck did you want to do that for?' and the whole table collapsed! Then Miles asked Eric 'How do you stand when you play? Stand up and let me see.' So in the middle of this dinner Eric stands up as if he was playing! Towards the end of the dinner Miles says to Prince's Dad, "Now I know why that motherfucking son of yours is so crazy!" It wasn't exactly relaxed, but there was a lot of love in the house.

TLM: Any further meetings?

AL: To my knowledge it was only their second meeting. Then we went on tour in Europe and they did, and I've got tons of emails from Gordon where we were trying to meet, but never did. Then in July 1987, I got a message from Gordon that Miles needed to speak to Prince urgently. Miles wanted a tape of the track "Movie Star" and Prince had decided that since Miles liked Movie Star he now wanted to do a whole album, and based on the emails I have, Prince was initiating this. This is now the middle of July 1987. I have an email from Gordon Meltzer and Peter Shukat [Miles's manager] saying that Miles and Prince hadn't spoken. It mentions the possibility of Miles being available to work on an album in September and October. Based on emails, apparently they did speak in August. Prince also sent Miles a second cassette of the second Madhouse album he had done with Eric. So now they've revived the possibility of doing an album.

Madhouse 16 - the second and final Prince/Eric Leeds album

TLM: So why didn't it happen?

AL: Was it a case of whether Miles wasn't seriously committed to doing a second Prince record or whether Warners didn't want it and were trying to dissuade us? I always got the impression that Warners were lukewarm about the idea of them doing an entire album. They were more of the mentality 'it would be nice to have Prince do a couple of songs and maybe do a vocal' as the marketing aspects of that were so attractive. But I'm not so sure Warners were happy about the idea of Prince taking over an entire album. I always had the impression that behind the scenes they were trying to contain the relationship - they'd love to have a couple of songs but didn't want it to go no further. But I know that Prince had roped off a couple of weeks at Paisley Park for him and Miles to work together, but it didn't happen.

TLM: But Miles and Prince DID perform on-stage at the famous 1987 New Year's Eve concert.

AL: It was a benefit that Prince had decided to do for homeless people in Minnesota. It was a very expensive ticket that was marketed to the corporate world. It coincided with the fact that Paisley Park had only opened in late summer so would be the first major event on the soundstage. It was a great event. At some point, it crossed Prince's mind that we should invite Miles. Miles flew in from Europe with Gordon and Foley. They attended the dinner and he was delightful - sociable, charming. He met my parents - they thought he was the nicest guy in the world! My mum's now 94 and afterwards she read the stories in Miles's autobiography and said "He didn't seem like that sort of guy to me!" He met my son Tristan and Miles signed him an autograph and drew a picture. He pointed at my wife Gwen and at me and then pointed at my son and said "You did this! You did this! That's good work sister!" He was a delight to have.

Of course it was arranged that Miles would sit in. The upshot of this was, that like James Brown, Prince has a set of elaborate cues for his band that cue certain breakdowns and changes of tempo and so on that he will spontaneously signal. Now he might be doing a vamp and let's say Eric is doing a tenor solo, Prince would just spontaneously feel he wants to break down and so if Eric hears that signal, he'll know what to expect, so if there's a change in key or tempo in the middle of a solo, he can follow it. Of course Miles had no way of knowing all this and so didn't know what to expect. So after the performance Miles comes off-stage and says "That little motherfucker tried to set me up!"

Continued:

Continued:

http://thelastmiles.com/i...-leeds.php

Interview: Eric Leeds

TLM: What was your relationship with Prince like from a musical point of view?

EL: Conceptually, as a musician, I was pretty much defined by the time I had met Prince. I can't say from a specific standpoint that he is somebody who had influenced me and defined me before I had met him. I was already thirty-two years old when I met Prince, which put me substantially older than everybody else in the band at the time. I was the first ringer that came in; somebody that came in from the outside and already had a music career of his own. Whereas almost everybody else who had worked with Prince, came up with Prince.

Another important fact was that I played an instrument that he did not play and, from the beginning, it gave me a much greater opportunity to define and develop my own role in his music than for any of the other people in his band. Prince looks at life as if it's a movie. He's the star, he's the director, he's the producer, he's the scriptwriter, he's the costume designer, he's the special effects designer. Basically, he likes to put everybody he knows in a role in his movie and if you're basically willing to allow yourself to be handled like that, fine. It kinda gave me an opportunity to develop my own character within his movie than I think it did for some of the other players in his bands. Plus I'd already known James Brown because of Alan's association with him [Alan had been Brown's road manager] - I'd known James Brown since I was fourteen - so having been around somebody like that, it kind of gave me more of a context of what it was going to be like when working with somebody like Prince. That worked for me for quite a long time until many years later that might have started to work against me! Prince and I have had our serious fallings in and out over the last ten years, which isn't unique with anyone who has ever worked with him!

TLM: So working with Prince was both challenging and inspiring!

EL: Absolutely. It's not a relationship that I had ever aspired to, but so much of what has happened in my career has happened because of my association with Prince. It's not as likely that I would ever had known Miles and that goes for a lot of other musical relationships I've had. The visibility and the notoriety that being associated with Prince gave me and being able to build on that. You never know how your life would have turned out, but I certainly don't regret anything of the relationship that I had with Prince.

TLM: How did Prince prepare his musicians for a new recording? Did you have charts for example?

EL: No. He does not read or write music. At the time I was in the band, myself and the trumpeter Matt Blistan were the only guys that read music. Basically, everybody else would play by ear. But Prince knows the difference between say, an E minor chord and an E major, but as far as reading musical notation, he doesn't know how to do that. So basically, it would sometimes be a matter of him humming parts to me if there was a specific riff or lick. Or a lot of times he would look to me and say 'is there anything you hear on this?' Or if it was a solo he'd just open it up to me. You never knew specifically what the process would be on any given song until you started working on it. There were many times when he'd just leave a track in the studio with instructions for me to do something, but a lot of the times he'd give me a bunch of tracks and say 'go in and do anything you hear on it.' More often and not, he would not end up using a lot of the things I would do, but occasionally he might. The way I looked at it, is that if he ended up using something that I had contributed, fine. But if he didn't, the worst of it was that it gave me an opportunity to just work in the studio.

You could not allow yourself to take any of this personally, whether he liked something or didn't like something, or the manner in which he liked something. Occasionally, I might have put an arrangement down on a song of his and he might have butchered it in my opinion. And I might think 'you've just destroyed the continuity of what I wanted to do,' but in the final analysis, what I was trying to do wasn't important. It's what he's hearing, because it's his music; it's his vision.

There were other times were he might have a starting point on a song and then midway through a line he might have said 'here's something, what do you hear off of that?' I might bounce something off of what he gave and he might bounce something off of me. And at the end of the song, I might be hard pressed to say what was mine and what was his - it really was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Those were the circumstances that were more intriguing to me, because it was matter of us trying to get into each other's heads. He had that relationship with other people, Sheila E particularly and of course Wendy and Lisa. From a conceptual basis, Wendy and Lisa were the two musicians in any of his bands who were able to tap into him on some subliminal level - they really did have a musical relationship that was closer than with anyone that he worked with.

My relationship was a little bit more from a player's standpoint. Because of the tremendous drummer and percussionist that Sheila is, [it meant] that relationship was very important. Some of the more interesting and more enjoyable music from my point of view was when Sheila, Prince, Wendy and Lisa and I would just go into the studio and just jam. I've got quite a few tapes of sessions like that. Purely ad lib, instrumental sessions, where we'd go in and just make a lot of music. None of it was going to get released; it was for our own enjoyment. Wendy and Lisa don't really come from a jazz background [but] they shared in the ability to be very spontaneous. Our ability to go in and spontaneously play some music and at the end of an hour come out with some music that at least we could say has some kind of musical validity and continuity. It may not have the harmonic sophistication of a straight-up jazz band, but the ethic was very similar. When Prince wanted to be spontaneous, he could be very spontaneous!

TLM: Which are the most memorable tunes that you recorded with Prince and were released?

EL: Some of my favourite Prince songs are the songs that I had nothing to do with. There's no one Prince album that I'm going to listen to from beginning to end without skipping tracks. One remarkable thing about Prince is that he's probably one of the most eclectic artists in all of pop music. The songs that I find myself going back to more often are what Alan and I refer to as his "boutique songs." The greatest example to me is the "Ballad of Dorothy Parker" [on the Sign 'O' The Times album] - that's just one of my favourite Prince songs. Interestingly enough that's the song where he gave me the opportunity to go in and do a complete horn arrangement on, which he didn't use anything from. That song was just so perfect without anything else. I happen to love "Anotherloverholenyohead" from the Parade album. I love Wendy and Lisa's song, "Mountains." [also on Parade] There's a song which I don't know has ever been released. It was a song of Wendy and Lisa's and it's known by various titles [including] "Welcome To The Rat Race," but was actually called "Life Is Like Looking For A Penny In A Large Room With No Light," It was Sheila, Wendy, Lisa, Prince, myself and a couple of horns and that was one my favourite songs. I liked "Girls & Boys." [Parade]. "Strange Relationship" [Sign 'O' The Times] I absolutely love.

Sign 'O' The Times

TLM: You're one of Miles biggest fans. How did you get into his music?

EL: I got into jazz at a very young age. Through the sixties, [saxophonist] Cannonball Adderley was one of my favourites. [drummer] Art Blakey, [pianist Thelonious] Monk, [saxophonist John ] Coltrane. By the mid to late 60s I had began to immerse myself in the avant-garde - John Coltrane and all of his disciples. Pharaoh Sanders is one of my absolute favourite horn players - Archie Shepp is another. All those Impulse! albums of the 60s. I was deep into Sun Ra [and] Rahsaan Roland Kirk was one of my favourites. John Handy, Byard Lancaster, Robin Kenyatta, Gato Barbieri - this was the music I was immersed in. For whatever reason, I had never gotten into Miles. I had [the album]Kind of Blue - everyone had that! I had Live at Carnegie Hall - I loved the version of "So What"; it's my favourite version of it. [saxophonist] Hank Mobley played his ass off on that. I had [the album] Miles Smiles but couldn't get into it. I'd read about Miles and he'd rag on [criticise] Coltrane and these guys and so I'd dismiss him - 'man, he doesn't get this.'

TLM: Did you listen to anything else?

EL: Aside from that that, R'n'B and particularly James Brown. Because I had such an opportunity to spend time with him, that music truly meant more to me than anything else. I never fantasised about being a part of James's band - I would have loved to have been his band's director - but I considered it to be jazz. I understand that it wasn't in the conventional sense. But if you ever ask me who the greatest jazz singer is, I'd say hands down, James Brown, from the purest sense of absolute spontaneity and the ethic of using his voice. His voice was that of a drummer. That's what he was - he was a walking time machine. And it was like he was a master drummer that was constantly improvising over one of the greatest bands that ever existed in any kind of music.

TLM: You're talking rhythm here!

EL: Funk and rock are duple meter rhythms, and by the 1960s, that had rhythmically become the coin of the realm, it was the pulse of the street; that's what people danced to. What I was desperately looking for in jazz was somebody who was going to take the ferociousness and the syncopation of the kind of rhythms that James Brown was utilising in his music and be able to take hard-core sophisticated jazz based on that kind of a rhythmic pulse. That wasn't dumbed down into Boogaloo kind of stuff, which was basically what you got when great jazz musicians tried to make a pop album or something that tried to appeal to a pop audience. Nine times out of ten it would dumb down everything to foolishness. Occasionally something would come along that would kind of work, like Lee Morgan's Sidewinder. Charles Lloyd's group were starting to break the line rhythmically.

But the other thing I was getting into was the density of the rhythm of James Brown. The two rhythm guitars. The way he would use the horn sections and integrate them into the rhythm section. His use of two, sometimes three drummers at one time, in live performances anyway. I'd absolutely loved Coltrane's Kulu Se Mama. He was utilising two drummers, extra percussion and there was this rhythmic density that was starting to get away from the conventional 6/8 triplet feel.

And while it wasn't quite funk, it was starting to get to a new place rhythmically. I would listen to [Coltrane's] A Love Supreme and James Brown one after the other and it was like two sides of the same coin. I was thinking 'somebody's going to really bridge that gap and is going to change things.' You could see people moving towards that.

TLM: So how did you build your Miles Davis collection?

EL: All of this time, I was completely unaware of what Miles was doing. So finally, one day in the fall of 1969, I'm in the record store and just browsing. I come across the bin for Miles and I think 'look at all these records. I've really got to see what this cat is all about.' I look for his most recent album and it's In A Silent Way and I look at the personnel and think 'oh my God, Joe Zawinul is on it. He was one of my absolute heroes and had been from the time he joined Cannonball. I was already getting into Chick Corea through an album he had done with Bobby Hutcherson on Blue Note called Total Eclipse. I knew Herbie, Wayne Shorter and Tony from their work with Miles, but I'd never heard of [guitarist] John McLaughlin and Dave Holland. I notice there are three pianists on it and I wonder if they just play individually on three tracks. But then I think, 'oh my God. If these guys are playing on the same song, that's going to be very interesting! I took the album home not knowing what to expect and I put it on and I don't think I listened to anything else for a week - that album just blew me away. The sonic textures, the polytonality, the density of the keyboards - everything about that record was 'my God, I've never heard anything like this.' There was a part of me saying this is as close to what I have been wanting to hear. It's not straight-up hardcore funk rhythms, but it's getting there. To this day, Miles's solo on "Shhh/Peaceful" to me is of the greatest solos in all of Miles's recorded work.

TLM: It obviously made a big impact.

EL: All of a sudden I'm saying, 'I really need to get into this.' As the months went by, I started to see the advanced promos for [the new Miles album] Bitches Brew, because Columbia [Records] did a very big campaign for that. I remember the ads they ran in Down Beat and they had a picture of the cover and it said 'A novel by Miles Davis in store soon.' Then I started to read the initial press release and saw all of these guys that were going to be on it - Jack Dejohnette, Chick Corea, Larry Young, Joe Zawinul. He's going to have two bass players, what, three drummers - this could be James Brown!

There have been two times in my life when I've been in a record store waiting for them to unbox an album. That was for Bitches Brew and when the first Weather Report album came out. I had a friend that worked at National Record Mart, a big Pittsburgh record chain. I got home from school and drove down town and he had a big box on the floor in the jazz section. He opened it up and pulled out a copy of Bitches Brew. I just grabbed it and drove home. I was an inveterate needle dropper, but of course withBitches Brew it was just one track per side! All I remember is that I put on "Pharaohs Dance" because that was written by Joe Zawinul. Then I listened to a bit of "Bitches Brew" but I gotta tell you, when I got to "Spanish Key" it was all over. I don't think I got to the other sides for another day - all I did was listen to "Spanish Key" over and over again; and I called Alan [and said] "Dude, you gotta go out and get this album because the world has just turned. Everything I wanted to hear was there. It was not dance music - I was not looking for dance music - I was looking for a rhythmic sensibility that similar in syncopation to what I would feel rhythmically from James Brown but still was hardcore jazz with nothing dumbed down about any of the process and the methodology.

I had Kind of Blue and I wondered how do you get from there to this? That's when I started filling in all the gaps. Within probably a year after that, I had all of his Columbia records. What intrigued me was how Miles got to where he did. I heard the albums likeESP, Miles In The Sky, Nefertiti and Filles de Kilimanjaro and all it made perfect sense in retrospective. And the more I read about where Miles's head was musically during those years and the fact that he was listening to James Brown and R'n'B, and so he was looking for the same thing. It occurred to me years later, that the most important thing in Miles's career was that he be relevant to whatever was going on at any given time. And his embrace of duple meter rhythms makes perfect sense in that regard. He realised that nobody listened to swing rhythms anymore - it was no longer the pulse of the street anymore. For me, what Bitches Brew was in 1970 was every bit as impactful and as important as Kind of Blue was in 1959. It was a statement that music is going to be different now and so much of what happened after Bitches Brew bears that out.

***

In part two of this interview, Eric talks about many more things including, the relationship between Miles and Prince, the stories behind the Prince/Miles track "Can I Play With U?" and the Chaka Khan track "Sticky Wicked," the Madhouse project, meeting (and having dinner with) Miles, playing live on-stage with Miles and Prince, the music Eric created for possible inclusion on Miles's final album and his thoughts on Miles's music of the 1980s.

Continued:

http://thelastmiles.com/i...-leeds.php

Interview: Eric Leeds

Miles Davis once said that Prince could be the new Duke Ellington and during the 1980s, Miles was keen to work with Prince on recording music together. Sadly, little emerged from this musical partnership. In the second half of this exclusive interview, Eric Leeds, Prince’s saxophone player during much of the 1980s, talks about the relationship between Miles and Prince, covering projects such as the Prince/Miles track originally destined for the Tutu album, playing live on stage with Miles and Prince, and the Madhouse project, which yielded four tunes Miles was set to record for his last album, Doo-Bop. Eric also talks about what the music of Miles meant to him.

Eric Leeds - photo by Lee Stanford © and courtesy Eric Leeds

TheLastMiles.com: Your brother Alan [Alan Leeds was Prince’s road manager for many years] says that you and Wendy and Lisa helped make Prince more aware of the music of Miles.

Eric Leeds: Alan had already told me that there were a couple of Miles albums Prince would listen to regularly, Kind of Blue was one and I think Jack Johnson was another, and there may have been a couple of other things. And because of this, I just realised that there were a lot of interesting opportunities for [Miles to] get involved in Prince. I remember once seeing an interview with Miles around 84/85 were Miles mentioned Prince and said if he was interested in listening to anybody, he was the cat. So I made sure to bring that to Prince’s attention and he looked at me and smiled and said: “When Miles says something about you like that, I guess it makes it all worthwhile.” So I said: “Yes, just remember that!” It wasn’t like we had a lot of discussions, but I do remember once I gave Prince a set of all the [second great] Quintet albums as a Christmas present. Now, whether Prince ever got into those albums or not, I don’t really know, but I was just trying to turn him on to different things. I turned him on to [John Coltrane’s] A Love Supreme and I also turned him on to Duke Ellington at Newport – “Diminuendo in Blue,” which he fell in love with. I’m really not sure what Wendy and Lisa might have turned him onto, but they were always turning him onto stuff.

[The first time Miles and Prince worked on the same piece of music was “Can I Play With U?”, a track composed by Prince for Miles and originally destined for Miles’s first Warner Brothers album, Tutu]

TLM: How did “Can I Play With U?” develop?

EL: I was on holiday at my parents in Florida and Alan called and said that Prince wanted me to do some recording the day after Christmas [1985]. I was a little pissed because I wanted to spend the whole of the holiday with my parents and Alan said “He’s only going to need you for like a couple of days and then you can fly back to Florida” – I ended up being there for about three weeks! We were in the studio almost every day. I had to fly home from Miami to Atlanta to get my horn and then go back to the airport and jump on a plane to LA. By the time I got to LA, I was fried and I knew I was probably going to be in the studio all night. I had a quick nap and then went to the studio – we used to work at Sunset Sound before Paisley Park [studios] was built. So the first thing that happens when I get there is that he has this track up and he said: “I’ve been talking to Miles.” I said: “Really?!” and he said “Yeah and I’ve got a track here that I want to send to him. Here it is, I’m going out to have dinner – do whatever you want with it.” I said: “Okay.” So I did what I did, and three, four hours later, Prince came back and listened to it and said “Yeah, that’s cool, I like it.” So I asked him “How are you going to get it to Miles?” and he said “Well, he’s in town, he’s in Malibu, why don’t we go to his house and give it to him?” and I said: “It sounds good to me!” So, he was on the phone to Miles the next day and then he said: “You know, I think we’ll just send it to him.”

That was basically the end of it. We were in the studio working on a lot of incidental music for the movie Under the Cherry Moon. Prince had started the editing process on the movie and he was in the final stages of sequencing what would have been theParade album, and Wendy and Lisa and Sheila were around. This was a time when we were just going into the studio and jamming a lot. There was another song that we did after “Can I Play With U?” called “A Couple of Miles,” it was a really nice song. I don’t recall Prince ever saying it was something he was going to give to Miles or wanted Miles to hear, but he was just in a Miles Davis frame of mind and it was like a tribute to him. It’s a little dated now because of the sound of the drum machine but the song was a much hipper song than “Can I Play With U?” It had a hipper melody and had a nice little bridge that allowed me to do some interesting orchestrations with a multi-sax horn section.

TLM: “Can I Play With U?” was rejected by Prince and pulled from Miles’s upcoming album.

EL: I really didn’t have that much opinion of “Can I Play With U?”. I don’t really know what Prince’s views were, other than he was excited about sending it to Miles. It was two or three months later that Miles had put his trumpet on it and he got it back. Prince gave me a cassette of it, but I don’t remember Prince and me sitting and listening to it together. I played it a couple of times and other than the fact that “Oh my God. I’m hearing my saxophone and Miles’s trumpet on the same song,” the music really didn’t do that much for me. And of course years later after Miles had died, Warner Brothers wanted to use that song and Prince decided not to let them use it. I am in complete agreement with Prince on that because now I listen to it and I think Miles didn’t do anything on it that would do him justice. And the track really wasn’t that great – it was not a particularly good Prince track. I’ve never had any subsequent discussions with him about it, but the fact that he’s not going to let it be used, that’s his statement that the music wasn’t any good – ‘it doesn’t do Miles or me any justice and let’s let this one gather dust in the vaults’. And I’m in complete agreement on this. [Note: the only official release of this track is on the CD boxed set of CBC’s radio series on Miles, The Man With The Horn. Disc five contains a 45-second excerpt]. I always think that what could have happened with Miles and Prince is what could have happened with Miles and Jimi Hendrix [around 1969, Miles and Hendrix came close to recording together].

TLM: Prince always seemed reluctant to work with Miles in the studio.

EL: I remember a discussion I had with Prince and he said:” I don’t know exactly what to tell Miles what to do.” And I laughed and said: “That’s exactly what he wants you to do. You’re not going to tell him what notes to play but Miles want a new experience and you’re one of the few musicians that he’s actually willing to go into the studio and open up to: “Reach into me and try to get something out of me that I haven’t been able to do.” And I said to Prince: “What’s the worst thing that can happen – he walks out of the studio – so what!”

TLM: You were part of an amazing dinner party on March 24 1987 that included Miles, Prince, Prince’s Dad, Sheila E and you. Was that the first time you met Miles?

EL: He had come by a rehearsal for the Sign ‘O’ The Times tour that afternoon and I was introduced to him then. I had gone home after rehearsal and got a call from one of Prince’s assistants, “By the way, Prince is inviting you to have dinner with him,” so I jumped in my car and went over to Prince’s house. I kinda think that Prince wanted me there to open up the conversation with Miles and get things rolling. Miles was as much a performer during that dinner as he ever was on stage. You couldn’t get him to shut up and it was very funny! There are some aspects of that evening that I’m not sure I want anybody else to know about, and if I do, it’s going to be in my book! [note that at present, Eric has no firm plans to write a book].

But basically the most interesting aspect of the relationship between Prince and Miles was the dance that they would do around each other. What Prince really related to about Miles was his character – his legacy, his mystique and everything that Miles represented as a personality. Prince saw in Miles so much of what he thought of himself – the person that goes against the grain, that’s opinionated, that doesn’t allow himself to be controlled by any aspect of the industry for his own artistic vision. And that’s very much what Miles saw in Prince. He saw a young version of himself but there was always something about the generational thing. It was like “The King is dead, long live the King.” You had these supreme egos that had an undying respect for each other but neither wanted to give it up to each other. So with Miles, you could almost see the cartoon balloon over his head saying: “Yeah you’re young and hip, but I’ve got all of these years of experience that you haven’t had yet.” While Prince was looking at Miles and saying “Yeah, you’re the icon – but you’re old! I’m the new version!” And it defined and characterised every aspect of their relationship and it was hilarious to sit back and watch that unfold. That was the biggest enjoyment for me – watching these two dance around each other.

TLM: Any more recollections you want to share?

EL: At one point in the evening, Miles grabbed me by the arm and said: “Eric, let me see your carriage!” I’m looking at him and trying to be cool and I say: “My what?!!” And he says, “Your carriage! Show me how you hold your horn!” And then I realised: “Oh my God, he’s using an archaic definition of the word carriage. He said “Show me how you stand when you hold your saxophone.” Then he goes: “Do you do it like this?” And he mimicked the way a saxophone player holds his horn. I looked at him and laughed and then I said, “Is that the way I should hold it?” And he said “Yes,” and I replied, “Well Miles, that’s exactly how I hold it!”

When we were sitting down the first thing I wanted to ask him was about the acid funk band with [guitarist] Pete Cosey [1973-1975], which is the band that I absolutely loved. I was one of the few people at the time that did! And Miles looked at me and said “You liked that band? Nobody liked that band! I never met anybody who liked the band. You liked that band?” I said “Miles, there were some of us who loved that band.” I also got the indication from his demeanour that that was a period of his life he didn’t remember too much about and what he did remember, he didn’t want to remember. I don’t think a lot of people realised that a lot of what Miles said, he said for effect. That he really wanted to say dumb stuff at times just to see how you would react or it was his way of making of point. So it was a case of trying to figure whether he was saying something for effect, or was heartfelt or was a direct response to a comment.

I remember asking him “Are you into someone like [trumpeter] Lester Bowie? A part of me said “Lester Bowie comes from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a kind of music Miles was known for disliking, so what will he say?” Miles changed his tone of voice and looked at me very seriously and said: “Why wouldn’t I like Lester Bowie?” But then it would not have surprised me if I saw an interview with him in a magazine the next week where he dissed Lester Bowie! Because he was going to say what he was going to say depending on how he felt or what he felt the purpose of the question was. It was an interesting night.

TLM: On New Year’s Eve 1987, you finally got to play on the same stage as Miles, during a Prince benefit event at Paisley Park studios.

EL: I always regret one moment. There was just one moment when I wanted to nudge the trumpet player Matt [Blistan, aka Atlanta Bliss] to go into a melody line in "Agharta" and the moment came and went by so quickly that I wasn’t able to grab it. I always regretted that because I really wanted to see the look on Miles’s face! The whole affair lasted for all of five minutes but it was cool.

TLM: Wasn’t Prince perplexed because the band was forgetting all the cues?

EL: He gave us one of his hand cues to hit a riff and as I remember it, no one hit the cue, because they were all grooving on what Miles was doing and Prince was kinda taken aback! He yelled “Hey, I’m still the boss up here!”

TLM: I was saying to Alan that it was strange that the concert was never released, although there is a bootleg audio and Video CD, Miles From The Park.

Miles From The Park

EL: The anticipation was a lot stronger than the actual event. It was a very fast funk groove that we were doing and it wasn’t anything that Miles was going to do anything other than just basically do his stick.

TLM: Miles appears on Prince’s song “Sticky Wicked”, along with Prince Chaka Khan. But I gather the song wasn’t written with Miles in mind.

EL: When Prince had the track up and Matt Blistan and I did the horn parts I can’t recall Prince making any mention about Miles, although he did say he’d written it for Chaka. Interestingly enough, the title “Sticky Wicked” had been applied to a different song, which was actually the title song of my first album Times Squared. I heard the track and asked Prince if I could work on it for my album and he said yes. And then a couple of weeks later, we were working on this track for Chaka and I asked what the name of it was and he said “Sticky Wicked!” Later on when we were on the road he said “Listen to this.” It was the finished track and Miles was on it. That was the song that got me officially into the Miles Davis discography! It was a much better track and much better utilisation of his horn than on “Can I Play With U?” It was a cool little song.

TLM: There’s a lot of controversy surrounding whether Miles and Prince ever worked together in the studio. In one interview Prince has suggested that they recorded together, but Alan is convinced that they never did.

EL: I have to agree with Alan on that. I don’t know what Prince was thinking or whether it was something that Prince said that was taken out of context. But I find it almost impossible to figure out how that could have happened, because Alan was still around running the record company and I was still around, although not a member of Prince’s band, I was working on my own albums at the time. Unless it was somewhere on the road that Prince and Miles met in the studio, but anything they would have done, Alan would have heard and I probably would have heard it too. It would have had to have gone through Alan’s desk. I know of no one else who has made mention of it. So I don’t know what Prince was talking about [TLM note: if Prince or anyone from his organisation would like to clear this up, we’d happily report your comments on this website!].

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Interview: Eric Leeds

TLM: Madhouse was a very interesting project. How did that come about?

EL: He called me one Sunday afternoon after the Parade tour and said “Do you want to come over to my house and play some jazz?” I go over to his house and he’s already got three or four tracks done. I had no understanding what this was specifically going to be because a lot of times we’d go into the studio together and do different things that would never see the light of day. I think the entire process of the Madhouse album was done in about three days and it was only when we got about halfway through it that he explained what he was going to do. It was kind of a double-edged sword for me, because it was obviously a project he was putting together to feature me; that I was going to be the ostensible prime attraction, which was great because of the visibility that it would give me.

But to be absolutely honest with you, I was never that crazy about that album, the first one particularly – the music was not that interesting. Once again, it was a very interesting and enjoyable project because the process and the manner in trying to do what he was trying to do and the way he got things out of me. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t stuff that I was particularly interested in listening to. There were some interesting parts. On the first album, Prince wrote all the songs and played all the instruments except saxophone – it was entirely his project. It was a wonderful opportunity, but the way it was marketed, [meant] a lot of people are under the impression that it was my music and it was much more of representation of what I am as a musician and it’s just not so - it was one hundred percent a Prince project and I was just playing the role of a saxophone player.

TLM: Prince went to great pains to hide the fact that it was a Prince record.

EL: This is what he came up with and I didn’t necessarily disagree with him on this point. He said “I’m not going to go so far as to say that this is jazz. This album will never get anywhere because the critics are going to blast it. They’re going to say ‘how dare this guy think he can make a jazz album.’ And if it comes out, I don’t want it to just end up with all of the Prince fanatics. I want to distance myself from this and see if we can get some form of an honest reaction without any preconceived notions as to my involvement with it.” So what it ended up with was all of these fictitious names [of band members and recording studio] that he came up with and then the whole marketing project became silly, because I was the only person that was going to have a real face. And the whole marketing ploy was based on me going out and lying to everybody about what it was about. After a while, it really became silly and to this day, Prince is aggravated over the fact that people found out that it was really his album.

TLM: Is that so?

Oh yes. I finally said: “Prince, give it a rest. Everybody whoever interviewed me about it was like “Oh yeah, I’m supposed to really believe that this isn’t Prince?” I would try to convince them but I don’t think I was fooling anybody. It became like an inside joke, like the fact that it was supposed to have been recorded in Pittsburgh, where I came from. And the fact that I lived in Atlanta and everybody in the “band” was supposed to be part time musicians who I knew from Atlanta. We came up with name, occupations – we put a whole back story to everything about the album – it was very funny. I realised that we had had created a monster when he had given the back story to his publicist and his publicist called me to put together the initial press release and in discussing it with the publicist, I realised that the publicist didn’t realise that it was all a lie! Prince had not let the publicist in on it! I said that’s perfect Prince, because if the publicist is going to make this work, he has to believe it. Regardless, it was very successful and the idea not to give the songs any names, just numbers was his, which was cute. And we had a top ten single (“Six”) out of it.

TLM: You did a second Madhouse album, 16.

EL: I really liked it except for two songs [Eric would rather not say what they are!]. That was a much more organic album. That came up from spontaneous sessions with Prince, myself, Sheila E and Prince’s bass player at the time, Levi Seacer. The four of us went into the studio over two or three days and just played and everything on the second Madhouse album came from those sessions. In fact, several songs that were one my first album (Times Squared) came from those sessions – “Andorra,” “Night Owl” “Overnight, Everynight, “ and “Kenya”. I made songs out of them with a whole lot of post-production work and a lot of chopping and editing and a lot of studio whizz-bang, but the basic tracks came from those sessions. 16 was more of straight-up, funk, R ‘n’ B album. I just thought that the music was better realised; it was more cohesive album. Unfortunately it wasn’t that successful.

TLM: Why was the planned 24 album such a troubled project?

EL: Prince did all the tracks himself and I think he started doing some of them when we were on the road doing the Lovesexy tour. When we were in Europe on the road in 1988 and there were a few off days, Prince would always go to London and work in the studio and I think some of the tracks came from those sessions. He called me into the studio after we got off the road – around December 1988 - and he had all the tracks done. I think I did all the horn parts in two days and he was with me for all the sessions. So we did the album and he did the mix on it and gave me a copy. I don’t recall what timetable he had in mind, but at that time, the relationship he had with Warners had started to turn [deteriorate] and things like Madhouse were hardly a priority for Warner Brothers. I think they were desperately trying to get Paisley Park records going as a viable label. If Prince had really wanted it released, it would have gotten released.

Several months went by and I never heard anything about it – Prince and I never had any conversations about it. And by spring of 1989 I asked Alan what was happening with the Madhouse album. Alan didn’t know what was happening, so I asked Alan to ask Prince about it. Prince’s answer was a little obtuse and that led me to believe that he was starting to lose a little interest in it. I wasn’t that crazy about that album. Once again, there were parts of it I liked, but as a whole it wasn’t something that held up for me. I also objected to the mix on some of the songs. Alan came back to me and said that Prince wanted to know what I thought of the album. I said that “Tell

Prince that I’m not one hundred percent satisfied with the mix and if it’s okay with him, maybe he’d give me the opportunity to take a couple of songs and go into the studio and remix them.” I was a little surprised that Prince gave the go-ahead to that. Between the time I was going to book the studio to go in, Alan said: “Prince has changed his mind. He says ‘forget it.” He wants to start over.’” By now it was summer time and Prince was working on the Batman album [Batman Returns soundtrack] and he had to hurry up and finish - he was in overdrive getting that done. But he wanted to get started on the next Madhouse album.

So basically he had gone into the vault and made four cassette mixes on about three dozen pieces of stuff. And he gave them to me and said “spend a couple of weeks on this and if there’s anything you hear that could be the basis of the next Madhouse album, go into the studio and start to have fun. Do whatever you want to do with this stuff.” And I’m thinking, “he’s just given me the keys to his vault.” There was a lot of stuff that was a bunch of crap but some stuff was cool. So I started working on that and as the summer progressed, I expected him to walk in the door and say: “Let me hear what you’ve done and let’s start to focus on this.” But as time went by, I started to realise that he was letting me have this one on my own.

And all of the time, I was under the impression that this was going to be the next Madhouse album. One of the things I did do was take the long piece from the original24 album called “The Dopamine Rush Suite” which was about 25 minutes long and I edited the hell out of it and made a seven-minute piece out of by taking out all the stuff I didn’t like. That ended up on the [solo] album. Basically I came up with my solo album. I made rough mixes and gave them to Prince and he said “I really like what you’ve done, but it doesn’t sound like Madhouse.” I said “How is it going to sound like Madhouse – Madhouse is you much more than me.” So I said: “What do you want to do?” And he said “I’m going to sign you to Paisley Park and it’s going to be your record.” I was hardly going to argue with that! But Times Squared wasn’t a hundred percent Eric Leeds album – it was a lot of my sensibilities and something that began as something else. It was a very interesting project and I was very grateful for the opportunity. I was very intrigued that he would allow me take what was ostensibly his music and take it into a completely different space. But it wasn’t until my second Paisley album Things Left Unsaid that the music was entirely mine.

TLM: But there were other attempts to record a third Madhouse album?

EL: Prince, me and a couple of other members of his band subsequently went into the studio. I’ve got two more Madhouse albums that were recorded in ’93 and as late as ’95 – stuff that never came out. By then his relationship with Warner was pretty much done and his interest in releasing music like that had pretty much disappeared. There were about three completely different versions of what would have been the third Madhouse album.

TLM: Where did the concept come for the intriguing album covers of a girl and a puppy?

EL: His own whack sense of humour. The fact that it was so completely off-the-wall, plus that was a girl [Maneca Lightner] he was with at the time!

TLM: Prince sent four of the original 24 tracks – “17 (Penetration),” “18 (RU Legal yet?”), 19 (“A Girl and Her Puppy),” and “20 (Jailbait)” to Miles for inclusion on his what would have been the album Doo-Bop.

EL: There was a song released later called “17” under the Madhouse name which was a completely different song. It was released on a sampler called New Power Generation. A lot of people got the mistaken impression that Miles had something to do with that Madhouse album and he didn’t. But Miles did play the songs live and go into a studio and record his own versions of them with his own band.

TLM: You also recorded some music for Miles that might have appeared on the album that became Doo-Bop.

EL: I did two songs for Miles in late 1990/early 1991 under Prince’s direction.
Miles and Prince would talk on the phone quite a bit. Miles was really interested in getting Prince to do something with him, but I don’t think by then, Prince was really interested in doing some tracks and giving them to Miles. I have a feeling that by then, Prince had lost a little interest in what Miles was doing and maybe at that point, he thought that what he wanted to get out of Miles, Miles wouldn’t have been able to realise. It might have been the sense that: “You know, I don’t want to get into a situation that might be embarrassing.” This all speculation because he never said anything like that to me, but knowing Prince I’ve always wondered if that might have had anything to do with it.

Prince looks at me and says: “Why don’t do you some tracks for him?” So I said: “He’s not asking me – he’s asking you!” And Prince says “Yeah, but I want to give him something”. “So I said “What do you want me to do?” and Prince said “Just go in the studio and have some fun and do something and send it to him. I’ll check it out first.” It was like “Maybe you can come up with something that I can then do some stuff with.” He left it open like that. Somehow it had been intimated that Miles was interested in Prince’s song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” so Alan suggested I do a track on that, so I did and a little thing of mine I called “Frame of Mind.”

TLM: Was your new version of “Nothing Compares 2 U?” different from the original?

EL: I changed it up a little bit. The textures were a little bit different.

TLM: Tell us about “Frame Of Mind.”

EL: “Frame Of Mind” was a song I did with my band back in Pittsburgh, which was based on a little guitar riff from side four of the Agharta album. About a third of the way into the side, they get into a momentary groove and [guitarist] Reggie Lucas is playing a kind of Curtis Mayfield-ish guitar riff that’s based on an E Minor 7th chord. I had put a bass line and a melody line to that riff. So I said: “Let me do this and maybe Miles will get a chuckle out of it if he recalls the riff.” And that track came out okay, but neither of them is Earth-shattering. I did them with drum machines and played all the keyboards. At the same time, George Clinton was in Paisley [Park] working on stuff and [P. Funk guitarist] Garry Shider was around and I thought “I’d really like some guitar on this and I’ve got one of the great funk guitarists in the other studio!” So I asked Garry to play a little riff which I showed him on piano and he put the guitar on it. So the tracks got sent to Miles but I have no idea whether Miles ever listened to them.

TLM: Did Prince play on any of them?

EL: No, but I can only assume that he heard them before they went off to Miles.

TLM: You left Prince’s band and later returned.

EL: I was out with him on the road for a brief period in 2002 on the end of the One Night Alone tour. I came in on the end of it – a couple of weeks in Europe and a couple of weeks in Japan. We were working together for a while in the studio in 2003 and I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.

TLM: What’s your take on the music Miles did in the 1980s?

EL: I can give you my subjective comments and my objective opinion and it’s up to anyone to draw the fine line between them. First of all, in order understand where I’m coming from about his music in the 1980s, I have to set it up. When Miles went into his seclusion in 1976, he basically made a statement that he no longer knew what to do with music, that he was no longer listening to music that interested him any longer, so he was going to bow out until he found something that was worth his while. And you can’t dismiss the fact that he was a very sick person at that point. If he had been completely healthy, I don’t think his opinion about music would have changed. The fact that there was nothing that was challenging him in music combined with the fact that he was very ill and went into seclusion was all part of it. This was a guy who up until that point had been obsessed with being relevant and finding something new to him.

I remember things that [keyboardist] Keith Jarrett would say about Miles: “Miles is so obsessed about doing something fresh and new that he would rather have a lousy band doing something new than a good band doing something that he had done before.” And he’d also said to Keith one might after the gig: “I don’t play ballads anymore, because I love playing ballads.” He was not going to allow himself a comfort zone and it was a hallmark of everything that Miles was about as a musician. I remember when all the hardcore fans who had even liked Bitches Brew had it when he went into the guitar-orientated acid funk. I basically thought: “If you don’t like electric guitars or the textures or whatever, that’s fine. But for what this band is doing, this band is incredible. You know Miles doesn’t want a jazz band -he’s going to do what he does. And the spontaneity and the ethic of the process of how he comes to realise his music is absolutely the same as for anything else he did in music. But he’s working with a different musical vocabulary and a different musical texture and a different musical sensibility and that’s what he wants. It doesn’t interest him to play jazz. He wanted a funk band and he went out and put together a great funk band and there was never a band like that before, then or since!

During those Howard Hughes years, Miles was basically living a life of drug addiction and sexual debauchery. You have to realise that this was a guy who had been to hell and back. He was probably as close to death as we’ll ever know. And through his friends, and particularly Cicely Tyson, he finally came out of that realising that he wanted to be alive. He never went through a twelve-step programme; music was his AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. He also wanted to maintain a lifestyle he was used to and basically he had one option – to play music again.

By then, Miles was finally defined. The unique thing about Miles, more so than any other artist that I can think of, is that it took longer to define his creative art than anybody else I have known, because he was so involved with so many things, from the period of time he went to New York [in 1944] chasing Charlie Parker to his period of seclusion in 1976. He was either the primary innovator or on the cutting edge or the best example of every evolution in progressive music and you can’t say that about anybody else. You can speculate about what [saxophonists] Charlie Parker or John Coltrane might have done had they lived, but they didn’t and Miles did.

Miles From The Park insert - click for bigger version

My opinion is that the entire vocabulary of progressive music, jazz and also pop music had been defined by 1980. There was nothing more to do by anyone. All you could be was an exceptionally unique stylist or an exceptional musician like Prince, who was able to make great music. But I don’t consider Prince to be an innovator. Stylistically he was, but the nuts and bolts of music, harmony, rhythm and melody - the vocabulary was done. I feel the same way about Miles.

Anything that anybody could say about what Miles had contributed to his musical legacy as a trumpeter, as a composer, as a bandleader, as a conceptualist, could have been said about him in 1976. If Miles had never played another note after that, everything written about him could have been the same. There’s nothing that he did after he came out of seclusion that really changes the legacy of his contribution to music. I’m not saying that as an insult but as a comment on the fact that when Miles came back, the vocabulary was done and that not even Miles could add anything new.

I’m not one of these people who says that Miles sold out or that he dumbed down. The integrity and the honesty that Miles brought into his music of the eighties was every bit the same as anything else that he did. But Miles had changed. And from a human point of view, probably for the better in terms of his own life. What was the main thing that people used to comment on when he came back? It was that he was acknowledging the audience and I think he was very touched that people were so happy that he was back again and playing music. It was like “If there’s nothing new for me to do, I’m going to just do what I feel like doing.” And he wanted to remain contemporary, so he wasn’t going to back and play “My Funny Valentine” again. He was going to play music that was relevant to the time he lived in.

That’s the objective way of looking at it. Subjectively, I’ve got to be honest with you - I hardly listen to anything he did in that period. When he came back, the first couple of albums [The Man With The Horn, We Want Miles] I listened to a lot because I was happy to have him back. But I realised that his sound as a trumpet player was never going to be the same. It’s impossible as a trumpet player not to play the horn for the period of time he didn’t and to pick it up and regain the same kind of tone. I was glad that the sound was at least what it was. The only objection I have from a personal standpoint is that the textures of his band, particularly in the late eighties, sounded very generic. But that was a function more of the synthesisers that by then had become very generic. In the early days of synthesisers you had to know how to create a sound, but the late eighties, they were all pre-programmed with hundreds of different sounds and textures and everybody was just basically hitting the same pre-set. It must admit that much of the material I recorded then kinda dates itself because of the particular textures that happened to be the flavour of the week.

And I just wasn’t interested in him playing songs like “Human Nature” or the pop songs he was covering. And to the extent that the bands and the music didn’t interest me, that’s not a function of the musicians, as much as a function of Miles, because Miles as a bandleader had the ability to realise anything that he wanted. He made a lot of music during the eighties that touched a lot of people and on any given night you had the opportunity to hear Miles play a solo that would transport you to a special place. But most of the music that he played during the eighties didn’t interest me that much. A lot of people got a lot out his music and I don’t begrudge them that. It was more about me than Miles because Miles didn’t owe me or anyone else anything. He truly enjoyed it and was into it and that speaks for itself.

I also think that Miles knew during the last years of his life that he hardly had the facility as a trumpet player to play the kind of music that hit the kind of harmonic or other challenges that he might have been doing previously. I think he was relishing the role of elder statesmen that he had now gravitated to and I think he wore it well.

The Miles that I knew isn’t the Miles that I think of. If anybody had told me in the 1970s that I was going to meet Miles the whole idea would have been frightening to me. And when I finally did meet Miles in the mid-80s, it was a different persona. From a standpoint of getting to know him the little I did, it was a lot better, because I would not have had the opportunity to have engaged in conversation, The fact that the last time that I saw Miles he came up behind me and threw a bear hug behind me – if anyone had ever told me that would ever happened, I would have said: “You’re out of your mind.” But the hero musician to me was not the Miles that I knew and I like that fact.

Miles is like all of these heroes of mine – James Brown or Prince or [keyboardist] Joe Zawinul. The guys that you put on a musical pedestal all share a tremendous sense of insecurity, which is very much a part of what drives them as musicians. And you saw it in so many aspects of Miles’s life. It probably comes with the territory that if you’re going to be a genius, you’re going to be dysfunctional. That Miles was able to be a survivor and truly enjoy the last years of his life; that was just an important as anything he might or might not have done during the last ten years.

Many thanks to Eric and to Alan Leeds. Thanks also to Dawnation for the 24 image and to Dawnation and Housequake.com for linking to this piece. Dawnation has an excellent section on the evolution of Madhouse.

^ Brilliant, thanks very much for posting this squirrel.

Great information.

Alan Leeds said:

One of the things Miles wanted was an instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" which Prince wasn't keen on and thought was kinda corny just to do a trumpet on top of a song that already existed. So he said 'I'm not going to send him the original track, let's re-cut it and try and give it a different flavour.' He did re-cut the song. I think Miles envisioned it as a potential "Time After Time" after Sinead O-Connor's hit with it.

I have to hear this some day.

Great info! Thanks MikeyB71 and squirrelgrease!

squirrelgrease said:

Alan Leeds said:

One of the things Miles wanted was an instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" which Prince wasn't keen on and thought was kinda corny just to do a trumpet on top of a song that already existed. So he said 'I'm not going to send him the original track, let's re-cut it and try and give it a different flavour.' He did re-cut the song. I think Miles envisioned it as a potential "Time After Time" after Sinead O-Connor's hit with it.

I have to hear this some day.

It sounds like a very interesting track.

The thing that gets me with the whole Prince/Miles Davis thing is that there were many opportunities for them to work together, either in the studio or otherwise, and fate or whatever dictated that it was not to happen.

The part in the Alan Leeds interview about his viewpoint of why Prince and Miles never worked together in the same studio is typical Prince in a way. My knowledge of Miles Davis is limited, but he seemed to be a control freak in the same manner as Prince, maybe less so, so could two people of that way of thinking work together? We will never know what could have came out of a collaboration between the two, it could have been amazing, two genius like people together making music. But it also could have been a disaster, two egotistical genius like people clashing in the same studio. It is such a shame we will never know.

Alan Leeds said:

Prince was loath to give out his number and I was one of a couple of people who would handle most of his calls. So, whenever Miles was trying to find Prince, he'd call. Sometimes I'd come back from the grocery store and there'd be this raspy voice on the answer machine saying "tell that little purple motherfucker to contact me."

^ Brilliant.

Miles From The Park, bootleg artwork.

[img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/Prince%20and%20related/P%20mag%20and%20boot%20covers%20and%20ads/Miles_From_The_Park_cover_spread.jpg[/img:$uid][img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/Prince%20and%20related/P%20mag%20and%20boot%20covers%20and%20ads/Miles_From_The_Park_back_outside.jpg[/img:$uid]

[Edited 9/28/10 19:18pm]

[img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/Prince%20and%20related/P%20mag%20and%20boot%20covers%20and%20ads/Miles_From_The_Park_insert_1.jpg[/img:$uid][img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/Prince%20and%20related/P%20mag%20and%20boot%20covers%20and%20ads/Miles_From_The_Park_insert_3.jpg[/img:$uid]

[Edited 9/28/10 19:20pm]

I had a great time talking to Eric Leeds one on one briefly and hearing him talk to the whole group about these times at the Xenophobia last Celebration.

ufoclub said:

I had a great time talking to Eric Leeds one on one briefly and hearing him talk to the whole group about these times at the Xenophobia last Celebration.

Sounds great, you are so lucky. i would love the chance to chat to him about Prince, and Miles.

Kudos!!!!!

kenkamken said:

Great read, thank you so much for posting. I should have been working, but this was very informative. I wish someone would have locked them in a studio together.

So many missed opportunities, so many could have been's.

sadly we will never know what a proper collaboration would have sounded like.

^I'm sure it would have been less than the sum of the parts.

Always happens when two real monsters meet and produce something together.

NOTHING they did would live up to the expectations.

vitriol said:

^I'm sure it would have been less than the sum of the parts.

Always happens when two real monsters meet and produce something together.

NOTHING they did would live up to the expectations.

I agree, expectations would have been huge, and as i stated in a previous post, two ego's the size of Davis' and Prince's might have resulted in disaster.

I think that a recorded "jam" session could have been more successful, where nothing was planned, nothing set in stone. Just Prince, Miles and a band together in the studio or rehearsal space and getting it down. However, the results might have been much like a planned album, it could have been as big as the Titanic, or sank like the Titanic.