first official release! Anyone lucky enough to see one of Prince’s solo shows knows that he wasn’t just an unnaturally gifted songwriter, producer, guitarist, bassist, drummer, arranger and performer — he was a hell of a piano player too, with a flair for balletic melodies and curlicue vamps. It’s a side of his talent that was seen and heard all too infrequently, although it was the format for his final “Piano & a Microphone” tour in early 2016 — which shares a title with this album, spawned on an autumn night nearly 33 years earlier.
Recorded around the time “Purple Rain” was filmed, “Piano & a Microphone 1983” comes from a cassette recording of a 25-year-old Prince, alone at the ivories, rolling through nine songs over the course of a half hour. (It was originally released during the 1980s as a bootleg with the equally fitting title “Intimate Moments With Prince.”) We hear him keeping time with a presumably very high-heeled boot and calling out to engineer Don Batts to turn down the lights or flip the tape. He roams and rollicks through sketches of tracks like “Purple Rain” and “Strange Relationship”; covers the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep” (which was powerfully used in the closing moments of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”) and Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You”; and concludes with two seemingly improvised tracks. Some songs go on for six and a half minutes, some for 90 seconds. He moves through different styles, moods, voices — playful grunts, falsetto shrieks, soulman pleas. He sings “Cold Coffee and Cocaine” in what is known to fans as the Jamie Starr voice, after an early nom de plume — a nasal, jive-talking character who sounds like a surly Morris Day.
He’s just rehearsing, just playing. But he’s Prince.
| Medley: | (22:38) |
| A1.1 | 17 Days |
| A1.2 | Purple Rain |
| A1.3 | A Case Of You |
| A1.4 | Mary Don't You Weep |
| A1.5 | Strange Relationship |
| A1.6 | International Lover |
| A1.7 | Wednesday |
| B1 | Cold Coffee & Cocaine | 5:14 |
| B2 | Why The Butterflies | 6:28 |
