It’s been more than two years now since music fans have had to wake up every morning in a world without The Purple One. The seven-piece tribute band When Doves Cry came together in Sacramento several months before Prince’s death and now stands as one of the best opportunities to still hear The Glyph’s music in a live setting. WDC’s setlist of Prince songs is 90 strong and growing. They come to the Ritz in downtown San Jose with a show they’re calling A Purple Halloween. Guest emcee is Lady Gigi from Purple Funk SF, a Bay Area collective of never-say-die Prince fans.

When Doves Cry
Oct 26, 8pm, $15+
The Ritz, San Jose

Monkey may very well be San Jose’s longest running, consistently-active band. The band emerged in 1995, but unlike a lot of Monkey’s contemporaries, it never mixed punk rock and ska. Monkey always stuck strictly to the traditional more R&B-based sounds of ska’s first wave.

We caught up with Curtis Meacham (vocals/guitar) to ask him about the side of San Jose he knows best.

What part of Silicon Valley are you from?

Originally, I grew up in Sunnyvale, but I’ve lived in Downtown San Jose a couple of times and it’s always been a blast. There is actually a lot of community feel that can be experienced in San Jose on different levels. In a way, it’s always entertaining.

What’s your favorite place outside of San Jose?

Well, I like Telluride, Colo., for the beauty, Victoria, BC, for the people, and Belgium for the amazing food! Right now, I live in Campbell and it’s pretty cool… only, not as cool as Belgium.

What’s the best show you’ve seen in San Jose?

Easily, Prince at the Shark Tank a couple of years back. He came twice in the summer and I caught both shows—absolutely amazing. Aside from that, there’s the crazy Cactus Club shows, like the Twinkie fight during Big Sissy Brigade’s show, or the on-stage beer enema during the Diesel Queens.

Who’s your favorite local musician or band?

There’s a lot of really cool talent in San Jose. For fun factor, there’s always FTB. For good songwriting, there’s David Brookings. For ass-kickin’ guitars, there’s the Gillbillies.

Where’s your favorite place to get a drink in San Jose?

The Cinebar is always the cheapest, but aside from that, I always visit Rachel and her band of merry men, down at the Caravan.

Where’s a cool spot to get clothes?

Working Man’s Emporium. You can get some cool Dickies, Carhartt and Ben Davis there.

What’s your favorite spot for a cheap meal?

Any Vietnamese restaurant—and I do mean amy! Seriously, how can you make such a rockin’ sandwich for $3? it boggles the mind.

What’s the best thing about living in Silicon Valley?

It’s close to everything: 30 minutes from the beach, 40 minutes from SF and three hours from serious mountains.

Where’s the best place in SJ to go relax?

The back room at Trials pub. It’s low key and there’s a fireplace. How much more relaxing can you get?

Where’s the best place to see a show in San Jose?

Believe it or not, it’s the X Bar at the Homestead Lanes in Cupertino! Hands down. But then you say: “Hey, that’s not in San Jose, proper” …and to that, I say “Suck it Trebek!”

What’s San Jose’s best kept secret?

That damn orange sauce.

For millions of people, Prince is an enigmatic musical genius, one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, and perhaps the most celebrated icon of funk in history.

To Morris Day, who plays San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest on Friday, he’s the guy he was stuck in the basement with every night for hours upon hours on end.

Of course, he’s much more than that. They started out as childhood friends in Minneapolis, putting their first band together in high school. But even after mainstream hits like “Jungle Love,” “The Bird” and “Jerk Out”—not to mention a co-starring role in Purple Rain—most people still don’t know that the Time’s first three landmark albums were written, arranged, performed and produced almost entirely by just two people: Morris Day and Prince, slaving away on the future of funk in a basement. Day remembers the police dropping by their lakeside studio several times to tell them to shut it down for the night.

“It was crazy,” says Day. “He wanted to be in the studio all the time. That’s all we did. We started playing music together when we were kids, but he’s always been more of a workaholic than I am.”

The illusion that there was an actual band performing on the Time’s records was created right from the first, self-titled 1981 album, since there is one pictured on the cover, fronted by Day. Prince’s contributions were obscured with the pseudonym “Jamie Starr.”

Of course, the Time was a real band, which performed live regularly even as they were barely allowed to contribute to the records. This came to be a huge source of tension, especially when the Time got good. Really good. As in, good enough for Prince to suddenly consider his creation a threat.

“We always say he created a Frankenstein monster,” says Day. “All of a sudden, this was a band that was better than his band.”

He’s quick to point out that he doesn’t mean better than Prince as an individual performer, but rather better than any group of musicians The Purple One was able to surround himself with. Live, the Time featured Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—who would go on to be two of the most successful producers of the 1980s, with 16 #1 songs throughout the ’80s and ’90s—on keyboards and bass, Day’s popular comic sidekick Jerome Benton, guitarist Jesse Johnson, drummer Jellybean Johnson and additional keyboarist Monte Moir, who went on to a successful songwriting and producing career.

The 50th issue of the acclaimed, Brooklyn-based Wax Poetics magazine is dedicated to Prince, and to honor the occasion, Stones Throw’s DaM-FunK created a Prince mix. But tonight at the Pagoda Lounge in San Jose, DJ Cutso of the Bangerz will do him one better by spinning a Prince tribute.

The show is co-produced by Wax Poetics and also features sets from the CME, Sig-O and Wax Poetics contributor David Ma.

Each of the DJs will take a different approach—for instance, the CME will spin songs from the extended Prince family (Vanity 6, The Time, Sheila E., etc.) And Cutso says that he’ll be digging deep for his headlining set, not just focusing on the hits that everybody knows.

“It’s the stuff that I really love,” he says. “There are some rarities that hold up.”

This from a man whose favorite Prince song is “Sister,” the Purple One’s jaw-dropping salute to incest.

“It’s one of his dirtiest songs ever,” admits Cutso. The song was on Prince’s third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, which despite the fact that it arrived slightly before he hit superstardom is indisputably one of his best. But that’s the thing about Prince—nearly all of his “eras” have their fans, and even a throwaway album like Lovesexy could produce a gem like “Alphabet St.” (Cutso says it will also be in his set.)

For Cutso, the tribute takes him back to the days when his musical “big 3” was Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. Plus, he says, “I had the biggest crush on Sheila E.”

The Prince Tribute at Pagoda is Saturday, Feb. 25 at 9:30pm; $5.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Maceo Parker has played with some of the most iconic and eccentric personalities in music history. As James Brown’s sax man, he helped write the rules of modern R&B. As the musical director of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, he led a sonic revolution in the ’70s. As part of Prince’s band, he’s helped him become one of the most in-demand live acts of this century. He’s worked on projects with everyone from Keith Richards to Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction.

The question is: how does he do it? How does he collaborate with pop’s oversized personalities without setting off a war of egos?

Duh, he’s Maceo.

“I’m easygoing,” said Parker by phone after winding up his extended New Year’s Eve duties. “I’ve got a real long, long, long, long chain before you get me out of my thing. I’m just one of those guys, I’ll open the door for you, you can go in the elevator first. If there’s a long line of cars, I’ll stop and let you in. I just do that.”

If Parker’s cool runs deep, it has also spread wide. “One of the things I never envisioned really is so many parents naming their kids Maceo,” he says. “Man, all over the world, I’m telling you. It’s crazy, really crazy. There was one time I had three little Maceos on stage. One of the left side of the stage, one in the center, one on the right. None of them knew each other, but they were all Maceo because of me.”

Parker has been recording with his own various bands off and on since the early 70s, winning a “Jammie” for Best Jazz Album in 2009 for his most recent album, the Ray Charles tribute Roots & Grooves.

When he comes to Montalvo in Saratoga on Wednesday, he brings a reputation for transcendent live shows that can stretch on for hours. He’s so known for epic partying he had to do four straight nights through New Year’s Eve last month, at Yoshi’s in San Francisco.

“People know what we’re going to bring, they know what we do. You’re going to get your party on, your dance on. That’s what we’re about,” says Parker. “I’m there for the people. They made a choice to come where I am, and I want to make it really worth their while. I’m there trying to give one hundred percent.”

It’s a work ethic that was certainly impressed upon him at a young age; he was only 21 when he started playing with Brown in the ’60s. Though the soul and funk icon was a careful arranger, he also relied on his legendary sidemen like Parker and trombonist Fred Wesley to keep his sound cutting-edge.

“When it came to ‘Maceo, time for you to blow,’ then I had to play what I hear, which is what is inside of me,” he remembers. “It was exciting, it was a little challenging. But then again, it wasn’t that much, because I was just playing me. Fred used to say ‘Man, I never seen anybody wake up out of a deep sleep and play as funky as Maceo.’ It’s all natural.”

It was a bit of a culture shock when he hooked up with Clinton’s spaced-out, psychedelic P-Funk crew, but he quickly made his mark.

“I really cherish the time I was with him. It was like a cult kind of thing, the following. It was cool, but coming from James Brown it was like ‘Whoa! Whoa! No, you can’t say that! No, you can’t do that! You can’t dress like that! You have to wear some kind of shoes. C’mon!’ I’m telling you, man, I was really thrown. Like, ‘what in the world is going on?’”

Parker has drawn from all of those experiences, but when he got the chance to set his own musical agenda, he discovered as a bandleader that the sound he really wanted to channel wasn’t so different from the one he had started out with in the first place.

“I’ve always had my concept of how I want to do it. It sort of resembles James Brown a little bit, because let’s face it, that turned out to be me, too,” he says. “It was James Brown, but it was also me.”

Rather than end up what he calls a “jack of all trades, master of none, “ he pushed his funk-based sound as hard and far as he could.

“That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I did,” he said. “I guess it shows.”

Maceo Parker plays Wednesday, Jan. 11, at Montalvo Arts Center at 7:30pm; $44/$49.