>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.