On 16 April 1985, parts of an orchestral score arrived at Prince’s studio for the debut album by The Family, one of the side projects he was producing that year. They had been written in Los Angeles by a 56-year-old jazz pianist from Michigan named Clare Fischer, who had never been in a room with Prince. He never would be.
Over the next twenty years Fischer wrote orchestral arrangements for Parade, Sign o’ the Times, the Batman and Graffiti Bridge soundtracks, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 and, as late as 2006, the Latin-tinged single “Te Amo Corazón”. All of it was done by phone, memo and tapes sent through the post.
Tapes in, scores out
The system was simple. Prince’s camp sent a recording of the finished track, Fischer’s son Brent transcribed it, and Fischer wrote string and horn parts on top, which were then recorded with an orchestra in LA and sent back. Prince’s instructions were minimal. Fischer told the fan site Housequake in 2006 that Prince had “left me completely free”, and that the budgets were big enough for him to write for full string sections rather than a handful of players.
Fischer sometimes went further than he was asked. When he scored The Family’s “Life Can Be So Nice” in July 1985, he kept writing past the point where the tape he had been given stopped, so that Prince could choose whether to extend the track. In the same interview Fischer said he had been told that, when someone suggested the two men meet, Prince replied that he didn’t want to because “it’s going just fine as it is”. Fischer’s own explanation for why the partnership lasted so long was that they had never met. The closest he got was watching Prince perform at the 2004 Grammy Awards, in a show that used one of his arrangements.
The Hi-Lo’s records that shaped Herbie Hancock
Prince was hiring someone with a long jazz CV. Fischer was born in Durand, Michigan, in 1928, and had mostly taught himself piano because his family couldn’t pay for lessons. At 15 he was leading his own band and writing all its charts. In the late 1950s he became pianist and arranger for the vocal group the Hi-Lo’s, and those vocal arrangements found an unexpected student in a teenage Herbie Hancock.
Hancock later said the voicings he used on Speak Like a Child (1968) came straight from studying Fischer’s Hi-Lo’s charts. In a 2013 tribute for JazzTimes he described the harmonies as “more advanced than what anybody else was doing”, and concluded: “I wouldn’t be me if it wasn’t for Clare Fischer.” Fischer also wrote two tunes that are still widely played, the bossa “Pensativa” and the Latin jazz standard “Morning”, and spent the 1960s recording bossa nova and mambo albums for Pacific Jazz alongside work for Cal Tjader, Dizzy Gillespie and George Shearing.
A nephew in Rufus
The route to Prince ran through Chaka Khan. Fischer’s nephew André Fischer was the drummer in Rufus, and in the 1970s Clare added string “sweeteners” to the band’s records. Those arrangements led to work with the Jacksons, DeBarge, Switch and Atlantic Starr, and it was through Rufus that Prince first heard his writing. The pop sessions paid far better than his jazz albums, and the money funded later projects such as his 20-piece brass band, the Jazz Corps.
Paul McCartney’s mix-up
Prince wasn’t the only star who knew Fischer only by name. Paul McCartney heard his strings on “Slow Love” from Sign o’ the Times (1987) and tracked down the arranger for “Distractions”, a song on his 1989 album Flowers in the Dirt. The string overdubs were recorded in Los Angeles on 1 November 1988. Speaking to People in 2017, McCartney admitted he had contacted “this guy called Clare Fischer, who I thought was a woman with the name Clare”.
Thirteen Grammy nominations
Fischer’s own records rarely sold in large numbers, but the Recording Academy kept noticing them. He picked up 13 Grammy nominations, winning Best Latin Recording in 1981 for “Guajira Pa La Jeva” from 2+2, the album that combined his Latin band Salsa Picante with a four-voice vocal group. Two more Grammys came after his death in Los Angeles on 26 January 2012, aged 83, for projects completed with Brent: the Latin jazz album ¡Ritmo! and the composition “Pensamientos” from Music for Strings, Percussion and the Rest.
