LOL and ROTFL @ When he started playing “Chicken Grease,” he asked the crowd to yell the name of the song. “It’s been 12 years,” I heard behind me. “Why would we remember?”


At Essence Music Festival, a Mercurial D’Angelo
By BEN RATLIFF

Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune, via Associated Press
D’Angelo performed at the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans on Friday night.
NEW ORLEANS — The R&B singer D’Angelo came back from 12 years of silence with a run of concerts in Europe earlier this year. Those performances, easily findable online, are as layered and complicated as they were in 2000, full of temporary full-group vamps that establish themselves and disappear, colored through with his chattering and hollering vocals. They prove, within minutes or seconds, that his talent hasn’t gone away. But his re-entry before American audiences may be trickier.

That’s the anecdotal evidence, anyway, from the middle of the crowd on Friday night here at the Essence Music Festival, which runs through the weekend in the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. Friday was not D’Angelo’s first American comeback: he appeared in a surprise all-covers jam session at the Bonnaroo festival on June 10, performed before a sympathetic audience on July 1 on the televised BET Awards show, and played a last-minute booking at the House of Blues in Los Angeles on July 4. But it was his first comeback concert promoted extensively in advance.

By and large, the crowd in New Orleans didn’t seem to want him to be the mercurial D’Angelo of “Voodoo,” the album just before the disappearance. They wanted the more concise D’Angelo from the mid-’90s: the bringer of funk satisfaction who wrote songs with singalong phrases like “Brown Sugar.” But he was mercurial anyway, thrillingly so.


He played for about an hour and 15 minutes, most of it unbroken; if you’ve heard audio or watched video of those European concerts from January and February, you’d have recognized Friday’s show as pulled from the same intense heap of songs, riffs, and teases. He appeared in all black — including leather vest, fedora, and motorcycle boots — singing the phrase “call on me,” and extended it with the line “in a minute-oh,” which his backup singers took over and repeated; then he picked up his guitar and the band trickled into the mysterious mid-tempo funk of “Playa Playa,” from “Voodoo.”

That fed into the Roberta Flack song “Feel Like Makin’ Love”; a new song which his set lists are calling “Ain’t That Easy”; “Devil’s Pie” and “Chicken Grease,” from “Voodoo”; “Really Love,” another new one, drowsy, hazy, and minimal, sung in falsetto all the way through. (When he started playing “Chicken Grease,” he asked the crowd to yell the name of the song. “It’s been 12 years,” I heard behind me. “Why would we remember?”) Next: a jazz guitar solo, by one of his two lead guitarists, Isaiah Sharkey. The audience shifted, squinted, waited to be impressed.

Thirty-five minutes so far, still no break, and hardly a word to the fans. This was really good D’Angelo, and also very different from any other set that had been heard all night — acts from the non-hip-hop American black-music spectrum, aimed primarily toward grown females. (The festival, running continuously since 1995, has been sponsored by Essence Magazine, and plays to the publication’s demographic.) Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, SWV, Marsha Ambrosius — they’d delivered songs and a concise persona. D’Angelo was more interested in vamps, evasions, elaborations, sketches, extensions. At the core, he’s an improviser.

After a 15-minute version of another mid-’90s song, with drum and guitar solos, the band walked off without a word. “He better do ‘Brown Sugar,’” I heard a few ladies say around the 50-minute mark. Well, would he? D’Angelo returned, sat down alone at the electric piano, and played a few bars of “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” another hit — then got up and smiled mischievously, relishing the tension it provoked. (He did play it through, but it wasn’t a showstopper.) Then another old one, “Lady,” and a new one, “Sugah Daddy,” stretched out long, with multiple false endings and James Brownisms — “put your hands together/come on, stomp your feet-tah.” And he was done. No “Brown Sugar.