As many of his former collaborators have attested, Prince wasn’t always the most straightforward person to work with. Or, indeed, to communicate with.
Take the experience of Jazz polymath Jon Batiste, who says that he encountered Prince when he was just a young man studying in New York at the prestigious Juilliard School. “Prince shows up to one of my shows, and decides after the show that he wants the band to be one of the bands that plays with him on tour,” he told BBC Radio 2’s Scott Mills.
As you might expect, Batiste and his band were happy to oblige, and played what he describes as a “short run of shows”, including two each at the MetLife Stadium and Madison Square Garden.
This gave Batiste his first taste of playing in front of a big non-jazz crowd, but it was only during Prince’s legendary after-hours jam sessions that he managed to get up close and - as it turns out - slightly impersonal with the great man.
“I remember, after the shows we would jam,” says Batiste. “The shows would be over and then, a couple of hours later, in a small room - a lounge in the stadium - there was a jam session. And the jam session would be maybe 100 or 200 people, jam-packed like sardines in a lounge, and the band would be in one of the corners.”
Describing Prince’s role during these sessions, Batiste says: “He would be going up, playing the drums and then he would go back, walk around, mingle, and he wouldn’t really talk when he would mingle. He would go up to people and they would talk to him, and he would just kinda stand. I remember, he came up to me and he didn’t talk, so that was one of my core memories.”
“Even though we had played and had kind of a brief rehearsal, I didn’t really fraternise with him until that moment,” Batiste adds. “There wasn’t a conversation until that jam.”
And even then, the conversation was pretty one-sided. “He came up to me, and I had a friend of mine with me, and she gave him a card of mine, a business card. And I was just like, ‘it’s great to play with you, it’s great to be a part of this tour.’”
Prince said nothing.
“But he was speaking through his eyes,” says Batiste. “He just gives us a nod. He mastered the art of communicating without using words.”
That said, with his friend pointing to the number on the card and suggesting that Prince might like to call it in the future, Batiste describes it as a “gloriously awkward exchange,” but one we’re pretty sure he’s glad, all the same.
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