LOL, that is sooooo uncanny, I wonder whether they had Ian's jazz excursion with the IGB in mind! He got a lot of flak for it at the time (and never got invited to the Montreux Jazz Festval with IGB either). But Bruce Dickinson, look and behold, is a fan of it, so am I. That album was friggin' brilliant (though even in Purple circles hugely divisive).
Ian has disowned it and nowadays says: "Brilliant musicianship, but Christ there is not a single straight beat on the album!" The music was indeed the band's do (who were all Weather Report fans at the time), Ian just sang over it, but with his penchant for off-the-wall vocal lines I thought it worked well.