The music world is reeling from the devastating news early Tuesday afternoon that soul legend D’Angelo died at age 51 following a battle with cancer.
“We are saddened that he can only leave dear memories with his family, but we are eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving music he leaves behind,” his family said in a statement. “We ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time but invite you all join us in mourning his passing while also celebrating the gift of song that he has left for the world.”
Michael D’Angelo Archer released a mere three albums throughout the course of his long career — 1995’s Brown Sugar, 2000’s Voodoo, and 2014’s Black Messiah — but they were all groundbreaking works that earned him 14 Grammy nominations, and more critical praise than just about any other artist of his era.
“D’Angelo is cut from a heavier cloth than the majority of his New Jack brethren: He’s a singer/songwriter with a mellifluous, sturdy voice that can coo and growl with equal conviction,” wrote Rolling Stone‘s Theo H. Coker in a four-star review of Brown Sugar. “No matter how delicate or dusty sounding a track may be, D’Angelo flips the script with B-boy savoir-faire: He makes the nasty rhythms bubbling underneath his multilayered love songs seem old and new at the same time…Brown Sugar is a reminder of where R&B has been and, if the genre is to resurrect its creative relevance like a phoenix rising from the ashes, where it needs to go.”
D’Angelo was also an incredible live performer, even though his tours were infrequent. He last hit the road in 2015 to support Black Messiah, playing a mixture of festivals like Bonnaroo and headline dates at venues that included Forest Hills Stadium in New York City, Club Nokia in Los Angeles, and the Roundhouse in London.
He reemerged in 2016 for a handful of overseas dates in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, but then didn’t pop up again until 2021, when he played a Verzuz event at New York’s Apollo Theater with special guests Method Man and H.E.R.
He last took the stage April 20, 2022, at a Netflix Is a Joke comedy event at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl headlined by Dave Chapelle. He played to a capacity crowd of 17,500 people that night, but fans had to keep their phones in Yonder pouches, and the policy was strictly enforced. As a result, the show was poorly documented on video and Setlist.FM only lists a single song from his supposed five-song set.
We do know that D’Angelo was backed by a stunning band for the show that featured his longtime friend and collaborator Questlove on drums, Raphael Saadiq, Jesse Johnson, and Norris Jones on guitar, Josh Dunham on bass, Rodrick Cliché and Cleo “Pookie” Sample on keyboards, and a large crew of horn players and background singers.
Somehow, a brave fan in the audience managed to get around the phone policy and capture brief performances of “Babies Making Music” and “Ghetto Music.” The former is a 1973 Sly Stone song, and the latter is a collaboration with Q-Tip that was never officially released. There’s no record of him ever playing either song prior to the show.
You need to squint your eyes to even tell that D’Angelo is on the stage in these videos, though Netflix did post a brief teaser that shows him walking onto the stage. They label it his “first performance in six years,” which is just wildly incorrect considering the 2021 Apollo Theater performance.
Somewhere in the Netflix vault is surely a complete performance of this set that will likely see the light of day at some point in the future. For now, it’s mostly just memories in the minds of the lucky few who attended. They were likely annoyed by the Yondr policy at the time, but it allowed them to witness genuine music history as it unfolded with their own eyes, and not through a screen. And what they saw was the last act by a true genius of his time.
