this is a good interview about madhouse. ive never really rated the madhouse records like others do - prince fans just seem to love them as it lets them think prince could cut it as a jazz artist, something ive never been totally convinced of, so its nice to see eric be so honest here.

Miles Davis dubbed Prince a modern-day Ellington, Would you agree, and how would you describe Prince's approach to playing jazz music?

EL: I suppose Miles was commenting on Prince's eclecticism and that he was a masterful pop songwriter much as Ellington was in his day, at a time when jazz was pop music. Prince's approach to playing jazz was little different from his approach to playing anything else. At times, he had a great sense of spontaneity, particularly in jam sessions and also often in our club "aftershows". But once he started to formalize something, I often felt that his determination to control everything worked against it being allowed to kind of find its own way in a more orthodox jazz sense. Having said that I do have some personal recordings of various unreleased jam sessions that I feel are more exciting than any of the released Madhouse material. In a more formal jazz context, Prince lacked the full harmonic vocabulary that even the most conservative jazz musicians took for granted. Certainly, much of Prince's recorded work is more harmonically sophisticated than most pop music, but the jazz vocabulary is in another league entirely. Also, while Prince could smoke the hell out of any kind of duple meter groove such as R&B, funk or rock, he had no feel for a triple meter jazz swing rhythm, so that limited the jazz component from my admittedly more orthodox perspective.

full interview here -
http://thequietus.com/articles/17801-eric-leeds-prince-interview