D’Angelo’s Live Shows Were the Stuff of Legend

I got lucky again buying tickets to see D’Angelo and his band the Vanguard at the Apollo Theater months after the release of Black Messiah. The moments leading up to the album felt fevered, the most intense desire for a record I’ve ever experienced. There was a listening session I couldn’t make. Friends who attended described miracles, a song called “Another Life” already becoming the stuff of legend. Cut to February 7, 2015 and he’s sharing the work live.

My friend Elias once suggested that what makes Voodoo such an innovative marvel is how it deconstructs the idea of the lead soul vocal. Every time I listen to the record, I think about that—how at times D’angelo’s leads sound like a pliant braid of backing vocals that move and curl around you, or like he’s broken his falsetto into pieces. Something magical, almost perverse, masochistic even, so wrong it’s right. “There are times when the music on this disc sounds so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones,” the inimitable Greg Tate wrote in his review of the album, and the sound I hear when I read that is D’angelo’s voice, clattering and unprotected. D’Angelo didn’t sing how Sam Cooke sang, or Marvin Gaye, or Prince. What he accomplished on Voodoo is sui generis.

But when D’Angelo sang live there was no question as to the power of his voice. His strength and his understanding of R&B tradition in a live setting revealed the boldness of his choices on record. Joined by eight musicians that night at the Apollo, he gave us what we wanted: his music. A clinic. Gorgeous. Aching. Wearing a red-and-black striped sleeveless robe, he performed “One Mo’gin,” perhaps his finest song, and as he finished the chorus he signalled to the band, flexing and then raising his arms, and they began to vamp, elongating the outro. The three back-up vocalists made it undulate with a rising and falling refrain—ah-uh-ah-uh-ah, ah-uh-ah-uh-ah—and D’Angelo wailed with grit in his voice.

Transcendent: the only way to describe the long, unfurling rendition of “Untitled” the Vanguard performed to close the show; the repetition of its question “How does it feel” becoming more profound with each utterance, like it was the only question worth asking, the one we have to keep asking each other in order to live. It was a bedroom song until it wasn’t, at about ten minutes in, when it became something like an entire worldview. I sat with my friends in the balcony and the only word was “rapture.” One of the best nights of our lives, we agreed then and now.