Prince Charles

Joined by his City Beat Band and wielding the Lyricon, a distinctive wind synthesizer, Charles "Prince Charles" Alexander issued several bold synth-funk LPs—Gang War in 1981, Stone Killers in 1982, and Combat Zone in 1984—that earned greater attention across the U.K. than at home, even as their strongest singles arrived alongside those by the Gap Band, Rick James, Grandmaster Flash, and the Egyptian Lover. Drawing on his background as a multi-instrumentalist and dedicated studio presence, he shifted focus toward mixing and engineering. Early assignments for Kashif and Sarah Dash during the 1980s gave way to sessions with X-Clan and Jodeci at the start of the following decade, yet his most sustained contributions came after he began a close partnership with the Bad Boy label. His technical work appears on nearly all of its key projects, among them Mary J. Blige’s My Life, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, and Puff Daddy’s No Way Out. Additional credits include recordings by Destiny’s Child, Marques Houston, Angie Stone, and Alicia Keys. As of 2007 he continued engineering while serving as associate professor at Berklee College of Music and instructor in NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music.