Prince vault yields a revelation
The first release from the vault is an intimate tape with sounds from Prince just playing around for fun
PRINCE “PIANO AND A MICROPHONE 1983” (WARNER)
After the shock of Prince’s death in April 2016 — as well as the surprise that he didn’t have a will, and the future of his estate was in question — speculation turned to what might be in his legendary vault. It’s a literal vault, in the basement of his studio/ residence/entertainment complex Paisley Park, filled with more than 8,000 tapes of music made by the notorious workaholic over the span of 35 years.
Two-and-a-half years later, the first release from the vault is this intimate tape which is exactly as advertised: Prince, alone at a piano, in a studio in a basement “family room” (according to engineer Don Batts) for 34 minutes, working out new songs, reinterpreting a song from his last album (“International Lover,” from “1999”), and covering Joni Mitchell and an old gospel song. There’s nothing polished about occasionally hissy demo tape: this is just Prince playing around, for his own pleasure. We already know a lot about his genius as a guitarist, a singer, a songwriter, a producer and arranger. Here we see his piano skills to be pretty much the equal of his other skills (OK, maybe not guitar), and hearing his voice in all its multi-octave, expressive glory against such a stark backdrop is also revelatory.
There are only a few complete songs here, including an incredible Nina Simone-style sketch of “17 Days,” a song that would be the B-side for “When Doves Cry” the following year. We hear “Strange Relationship” four years before he recorded a full-band funk version for “Sign O the Times.” There’s a snippet of “Purple Rain” that bleeds into an equally brief turn on Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” where his jazzy chord voicings are just as interesting but different from Mitchell’s originals. He beatboxes on “International Lover.” And there are three songs that have never surfaced on any official release.
When he died, Prince had returned to this format, on an acclaimed tour also called “Piano and a Microphone.” No doubt there are great tapes from that as well. But to hear him in 1983, right before “Purple Rain” made him one of the biggest stars in the world, is an astonishing document that even the most casual Prince fan will find thrilling. All those deluxe reissues of music we’ve already heard can wait, as long as the vault is full of stuff like this.
Stream: “17 Days,” “Wednesday,” “Mary Don’t You Weep”
LENNY KRAVITZ “RAISE VIBRATION” (ROXIE/SONY)
This summer, Lenny Kravitz released two of his funkiest singles in many a moon: “Low” and “It’s Enough,” both of which rode slinky grooves and echoed the best Michael Jackson and Curtis Mayfield singles — not to mention Kravitz’s own classic “It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over.” If that’s the kind of vibe he was going to explore on his new album, then maybe it was time to start paying attention again.
And it was. “Raise Vibration” is everything Kravitz does best: a pastiche of classic funk, soul, rock and pop. This time out he doesn’t seem to have his aim as centred on the pop charts — it’s inexplicable why he wouldn’t release the surefire hit “5 More Days Til Summer” as a single earlier this year. Instead, “Raise Vibration” sounds like Kravitz just doing whatever the heck he wants, including a sample of a powwow group at the end of the title track. There’s even a psychedelic funk-folk ballad about Johnny Cash comforting him after the death of Kravitz’s mother — which, as one can imagine, doesn’t really work lyrically, to say the least, even after you find out it’s based on a true story. But the music is still lovely, and if that’s the worst track here, then Kravitz is doing just fine.
The world around him, however, is not doing fine at all: hence the litany of injustices in “It’s Enough,” and the chorus of “Who Really Are the Monsters?”: “The war won’t stop as long as we keep dropping bombs.” Stream: “It’s Enough,” “Raise Vibration,” “Who Really Are the Monsters?”
FANTASTIC NEGRITO “PLEASE DON’T BE DEAD” (COOKING VINYL)
t.”“Take that bulls — t, turn it into good s —
That’s exactly what the man born Xavier Dphrepaulezz does with his work as Fantastic Negrito. The 49-year-old guitarist from Oakland, Calif., has lived at least three lives; his biography is bananas, filled with heartbreak, pain, destitution, rebirth, and most recently a Grammy award as an independent artist. His resilience is evident in everything he does.
“Please Don’t Be Dead,” his second album as Fantastic Negrito, is a tour-deforce of modern blues music: he borrows the best parts of Funkadelic more effectively than Childish Gambino; his backing band could give the Roots a run for their money; his songwriting speaks to the desperation of these times — the corruption, the opioid crisis, the gun culture, the dismantling of truth itself — in ways that so few artists dare to do. One song is titled “A Letter to Fear” — this is an artist who has feels more than lucky to just be alive (he survived a terrible car accident in 1999) — and another is “Never Give Up.” The chorus to the incendiary single (and video) “Plastic Hamburgers” is a call to “break all these chains, let’s burn it down.” The music of Fantastic Negrito is the sound of overcoming both artificial barriers and very real obstacles: the strength required to do so can be heard in every note here.
Yes, that new Lenny Kravitz album is pretty good. But Fantastic Negrito renders that, and most other music made in 2018, mere child’s play.
Stream: “Plastic Hamburgers,” “Bad Guy Necessity,” “Transgender Biscuits”