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Prince
Air Canada Centre in Toronto on Friday
Let’s go crazy. Let’s party like it’s 1999. Let’s spend three hours with Prince, and afterward try to think of anyone else who could give a concert spanning three decades of hits and nearly 30 albums without ever getting lost on memory lane.
After a few days of technical rehearsals at Hamilton’s Copps Colliseum, Prince’s oddly-named Welcome 2 Canada tour – welcome 2 U 2, Prince! – set up at Air Canada Centre for two nights of recombinant funk-flavoured music by the 53-year-old star and his New Power Generation band. From the start, it was clear that Prince would have nothing to do with anything so banal as a living jukebox recreation of a song as recorded.
No, if there was a governing form to this show, it was that of the medley – a slack vehicle for some, but not for Prince. His sprawling 30-minute song-suites pulled familiar tunes into startling new shapes and contexts.
Musicology, the base for one early long jam, actually seemed to change its state, from a linear song to an all-absorbing rhythmic environment. It was like hearing the hypertext version, with some links clicked on and others merely noted, maybe for future exploration. There was so much in there, I began to think that Prince could probably sustain a concert with just one song, laid out as an armature into which all manner of jams, interpolations and harmonic puns could be placed.
The stage, set in the middle of the stadium, took the shape of the unpronounceable love symbol Prince used for a while as a name. The fluid curves and central axis of this device, realized as so much runway footage, gave Prince and his three backup singers plenty of room to address the crowd from all angles.
He sang in his raspy midrange and piping falsetto, danced with liquid ease, and played ornate moody guitar solos as though thinking aloud through the instrument. He played the audience too, catching us up with countless false endings, before driving on with yet another twist on the song at hand. He read the response to everything he did, like a despot who was also a pure democrat, in total control at all times yet eager to claim every last vote in the room.
His band, a super-tight ensemble whose jazz chops flashed by in a bebop break near the top, included saxophonist Maceo Parker, who seemed to function partly as a living link with James Brown. Whenever Parker stepped up for a solo, it seemed as if Prince were deferring to the wisdom of the elders, and acknowledging the source of the funk ethos that defined much of the show.
The set included a slew of old favourites made new, including Cream, When Doves Cry, Kiss, Take Me With U and Raspberry Beret, performed as a watercolour animation streaked across the overhead screens. The covers were all cleverly curated, especially Yesterday, sung by one of Prince’s singers as a mind-blowing preface to a recontextualized Nothing Compares 2 U.
Prince went into encore mode after Purple Rain, though at that point, two hours on, he had yet to touch the piano-shaped keyboard console parked at one side of the stage. We had to make him do that, call him back with applause, give him new life like Tinkerbell. Seduction is always a big element in any Prince performance, and it always goes both ways.
Prince plays 18 more shows in nine cities across Canada through Dec. 17, starting at Halifax’s Metro Centre on Nov. 30.
