State Theatre New Jersey in New Brunswick was the stage that served as the launching pad for the ‘4U: A Symphonic Celebration of Prince,’ tour.
The start of the tour began on Sept. 6 at the State Theater New Jersey and will then move on throughout New Jersey. The tour will then pick up steam and will cover 21 states in the next seven weeks and then cross the ocean and continue on into Europe by the end of the year of 2018.
The concert, presented by TCG Entertainment and Live Nation Urban, will present the music of Prince like never before, with a full symphony orchestra. The music and orchestral arrangements for the show were curated by Questlove from The Roots, who is an avid Prince fan. The show will also feature a live band with world class musicians and vocalists who will perform with the orchestra.
“We’re an industry leader in the creation of touring shows,” said Stephen Cook of TCG Entertainment and creator and co-producer of the 4U concert tour. “We work a lot in the symphony space, creating what I would call hybrid shows. They are symphonic, but they bring in sort of different parts of entertainment.”
The tour has been officially approved by The Prince Estate and is the first and only approved symphonic production.
“It was actually a pretty easy process working with The Prince Estate,” Cook said. “We went out there about a year ago, and we just went out there and pitched our idea of celebrating his music in a symphonic format. We were able to bring in Questlove from the Roots to do the charts. Since that time, we have just been in development. Doing something like this is hard in terms of chart creations and symphonic arrangements, there’s a lot to it. We have been going through that process and are still going through that process as we lead up to [everything].”
Cook, who planned out the entire tour, wanted to give back to the fans of Prince that lost him so quickly.
“Given Prince’s untimely passing, and the suddenness of it, this allows people to really pay homage to him, and that’s what we are hoping to accomplish,” he said.
Prince died in April of 2016.
TCG Entertainment, who brought out Questlove to compose the orchestral arrangements for the tour, felt that with him being such a big Prince fan, himself, there could be no other way.
“With Prince’s music, what I think you’ll see is with all the different venues that we’re in, it makes it a nice evening out, and what we are really trying to do is create a respectful celebration of his music and adding an orchestra to his music does that,” he said. “What Questlove is creating is a masterpiece through his arrangements. He’s a number one Prince fan, and what he is creating is amazing, and it’s very cool.”
TCG Entertainment has plenty of experience turning different genres of music into a night of symphonic joy, and that’s what they felt they could do with music of Prince.
“Prince is such a legendary artist and his fans span through multiple generations, and his music lends himself to that,” he said. “We have found that when we do shows that are with a symphony, it’s just a different vibe and feel to it. Another show that we do is with classic rock. It’s full on rock with an orchestra. It brings in a different type of audience and a different demographic with a different feel to it.”
But overall, the goal for this concert tour is to bring in all different people, from different ways of life and celebrate the music of Prince.
“As we put this together, what we really wanted to be able to do was to bring in fans, whether hard core or casual, to really celebrate his music in a unique way with a full symphony and with the video and other multi-media aspects that we added, it’s going to be a really neat celebration of his music,” he said.