From Miles Davis' autobiography
In 1987 I was really getting into the music of Prince and the music of Cameo and Larry Blackmon, and the Caribbean group called Kassav. I love the things they're doing. But I really love Prince, and after I heard him, I wanted to play with him sometime. Prince is from the school of James Brown, and I love James Brown because of all the great rhythms he plays. Prince reminds me of him and Cameo reminds me of Sly Stone. But Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly in him, also, even Little Richard. He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington. He reminds me, in a way, of Charlie Chaplin, he and Michael Jackson, who I also love as a performer. Prince does so many things, it's almost like he can do it all;
write and sing and produce and play music, act in films, produce and direct them, and both him and Michael can really dance.
They both are motherfuckers, but I like Prince a little better as an all-around musical force. Plus he plays his ass off as well as sings and writes. He's got that church thing up in what he does. He plays guitar and piano and plays them very well. But it's the church thing that I hear in his music that makes him special, and that organ thing. It's a black thing and not a white thing. Prince is like the church to gay guys. He's the music of the people who go out after ten or eleven at night. He comes in on the beat and plays on top of the beat. I think when Prince makes love he hears drums instead of Ravel. So he's not a white guy. His music is new, is rooted, reflects and comes out of 1988 and '89 and '90. For me, he can be the new Duke Ellington of our time if he just keeps at it.
When Prince asked me to come to Minneapolis to bring in the new year of 1988 and maybe we could play a song or two together, I went. In order to become a great musician the musician has to have the ability to stretch and Prince can certainly stretch. Me and Foley went out to Minneapolis. Man, Prince has got a hell of a complex out there. Record and movie equipment, plus he had an apartment for me to stay in. The whole thing seems like it's about half a block. He's got sound stages and everything. Prince put on a concert to aid the homeless of Minneapolis and charged people $200 per person to get in. The concert was held in his new Paisley Park Studios. The place was packed. At midnight, Prince sang "Auld Lang Syne" and asked me to come up and play something with the band and I did, and they taped it.
Prince is very nice, a shy kind of person, a little genius, too. He knows what he can and cannot do in music and in everything else. He gets over with everyone because he fulfills everyone's illusions. He's got that raunchy thing, almost like a pimp and a bitch all wrapped up in one image, that transvestite thing. But when he's singing that funky X-rated shit that he does about sex and women, he's doing it in a high-pitched voice, in almost a girl's voice. If I said "Fuck you" to somebody they would be ready to call the police. But if Prince says it in that girl-like voice that he uses, then everyone says it's cute. And he isn't out in the public eye all the time; he's a mystery to a lot of people. Me and Michael Jackson are the same way. But he's really like his name, man, a prince of a person when you get to know him.
