D'Angelo makes up for lost time at the Keswick Theatre
D'Angelo has a lot of lost time to make up for. The Virginia soul man, who played a sweaty, muscular, unrelenting, nearly two-hour show at the Keswick Theatre on Tuesday, has been more absent than present during his two-decade career.
D'Angelo has a lot of lost time to make up for.
The Virginia soul man, who played a sweaty, muscular, unrelenting, nearly two-hour show at the Keswick Theatre on Tuesday, has been more absent than present during his two-decade career.
After his debut, Brown Sugar, in 1995, the singer born Michael Eugene Archer struggled with writer's block and took five years to release its follow-up, Voodoo. But that was nothing compared to the layoff - elongated by alcoholism and personal problems - between that classic of sultry, simmering funk and its successor. Black Messiah finally landed like a surprise Christmas gift in December, well timed for its socially conscious relevance to the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
The tinkering auteur returned to the stage in 2012. That summer, he opened for Mary J. Blige at the Mann Center and played the inaugural Made in America fest. The following summer, he did a tantalizing two-man show at the Theatre of Living Arts with drummer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson of the Roots.
But D'Angelo at the Keswick was something different. With new music and a fantastic nine-piece new band, the Vanguard, to show off, he was a man freed from self-imposed constraints, finally able to strut his stuff in all his funkalicious glory.
This was not the not-quite-sure-of-himself returning soul man hiding behind his keyboard, as he was three years ago. This was an exuberant, exultant showman, counting off the beat to the vise-tight band in James Brown homage, wearing tricked-out, flowing robes and cock-of-the-walk hats. For a while, it seemed he was aiming to out-costume-change Taylor Swift.
The emphasis was on Black Messiah, although D'Angelo also reached back as far as Brown Sugar's ecstatically erotic title cut, with its 215-inspired opening verse: "Let me tell you 'bout this girl / Maybe I shouldn't / I met her in Philly and her name was Brown Sugar." That paired naturally with the new album's "Sugah Daddy," which, like all of the night's songs, was stretched out, funkified, and elaborated in an arrangement energetically reworked on the spot.
Opening with "Ain't That Easy," a love song that could be about the creative process, D'Angelo repeatedly took the hyped-up crowd to church, switching from guitar to keyboard to falsetto, the 41-year-old son of a Pentecostal minister moving - and singing - with a physical presence more akin to a bruising middle linebacker than the ripped cornerback who went shirtless on the Voodoo album cover.
The can't-stop-won't-stop celebration showcased guitarists Isaiah Sharkey (with whom D'Angelo carried on a dazzling scat-singing call-and-response conversation on "Betray My Heart") and onetime Prince guitarist Jesse Johnson (dressed in a trenchcoat in the style of McGruff the Crime Dog), as well as two horn players and a trio of singers, in particular Kendra Foster, the George Clinton alum who is also a key songwriting collaborator.
There were moments of socially conscious seriousness, particularly with Black Messiah's "Charade," which features as concise and chilling a condemnation of racial injustice in a song couplet as you're ever likely to hear. "All we wanted was a chance to talk / 'Stead we only got outlined in chalk." D'Angelo led the crowd in holding Black Power fists high, and he dedicated the song to "the lives that were lost in Charleston last week," as well as to African American men who have died in police violence, including Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray.
Did the show have a flaw? Black Messiah is a subtle record that rides a complex, often whispery groove. In concert, that inward-looking vibe opened up, turning into a raucous, invigorating adventure in a communal release that seemed to replenish the singer's spiritual well-being even more than that of the audience. Dynamically, it could have benefited from a few quiet moments of vulnerability.
But there will be time for soul searching in the future: This show was about the soul man stepping out, seizing the opportunity to make up for the good times he's missed.
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