Come closer

D’Angelo, that Pentecostal preacher’s son, the man Robert Christgau called ‘R&B Jesus’, has died, and, with him, a way of seeing and interpreting the world has been withdrawn. Every one of his records was rapturous. There are few people with a singing voice as sensitive, as patient, as sensuous. His music is a reminder that devotion can be a multisensory affair. That an embouchure scar from playing the trumpet – you can hear little fillips of Roy Hargrove’s horn on so many of D’Angelo’s songs – may be related to a prayer bump, the callus that can develop when a forehead continually kisses the ground. He took the mumblings and around-the-house humming that lots of us do and transfigured them. And then he angled those gorgeous utterances skyward, finding matching sensations between gospel and secular music, or between the liquor store and the health-food stand, to quote the lyrics of ‘Lady’, the 1995 hit from Brown Sugar, his first album.

He created ligatures between different social and spiritual atmospheres. His songs are diaphanous, full of soft spots, thresholds between the flesh-and-blood world we experience directly, where we grip and grab matter – one another’s hands, the backs of chairs, staircases, fire escapes – and somewhere more ethereal, which hovers above and around us, like an angelic doo-wop chorus on a street corner, huddling over a barrel fire, working out a harmony. His footprint-in-sand style of singing held space for lots of interpretations – for listeners to envisage their own ecstasies. ‘A lot of people are real busy tryin’ to get their point across,’ he told Vibe in 1995. ‘Not letting the listener use their imagination. You should be able to lay back and close your eyes and come up with your own vision.’

On ‘Chicken Grease’, from Voodoo (2000), the ‘Good God Almighty’ of church service converges with the guttural, speakeasy expression of the phrase. D’Angelo took common lyrical building blocks – like ‘doo doo wah’, ‘ooh wee’, ‘ooh ooh’ or ‘la la la’, fillers that can say nothing at all – and reanimated them with the gleeful, transcendent magic they started out with. At the end of ‘One Mo’Gin’, also from Voodoo, a panoply of ‘ahs’ pans between the right and left ears, creating a headphone hall of mirrors, which blends into the hoodoo tale of ‘The Root’, the next tune up, itself heaped with more than forty vocal tracks.

‘He might not come when you want him, but he’s always on time’: I’ve heard that said a lot about God, but it could also apply to our guy D’Angelo. His three studio albums are miracles of timing: Brown Sugar and Voodoo are both masterpieces, appearing when so much R&B was becoming formulaic. Black Messiah – with songs that had been in development for years, like ‘1000 Deaths’, with its briarpatch funk and distortion-pedal torsion – came out in December 2014, in the wake of the murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

The music industry currently likes to schedule artists’ projects in two to three-year increments, more or less, a steady, reliable rhythm. If that rate was robotic, metronomic, then D’Angelo’s timeline was non-quantised, like the offbeat drum programming style of the late J Dilla, a collaborator and friend of his. Perhaps keeping that irregular tempo was a way of reclaiming his time. After the first album, he took a break. ‘Just wanted to relax and live a little bit,’ he said. As he sang on ‘Spanish Joint’, ‘something in me has got to be/the sole controller in control of me.’

D’Angelo fans are used to living our lives in between announcements. D’Angelo was my favorite singer, but I only saw him perform twice, during the Black Messiah cycle: once in Brooklyn, waiting for a hint of the first single; the other time in Los Angeles, when the music was out into the world. This year I was set to see him again, in Philadelphia, but just days before his performance, he cancelled.

One of my favourite D’Angelo songs, ‘Greatdayndamornin’/Booty’, is about all the mundane shit you’d get up to in between his releases, the daily struggle to ‘get it in the pocket/cause lord knows if there’s an angle, I gotta try and find it.’ The chorus is a hypnotic list of ‘good days, bad days, halfway days/good times, bad times, halfway times’. When the beat shifts into ‘Booty’, he gets more descriptive about the brighter moments that may occur in the morning: taking a shower, smoking something, making love, praying. Here, too, D’Angelo’s twin spirit strikes again, as he pairs the regular degular early hours with the ‘morning’ that the Winans sing about on their gospel hit ‘Ain’t No Need to Worry’ and ‘the new day’ in the sense that Rev. Jesse Jackson might mean it.

Last year I interviewed Fred Moten, the poet and theorist, and he talked about the chatter in the background of soul songs like ‘What’s Going On’. The songs were going out into the mainstream, to be covered or whitewashed in the fluorescent lights of Top 40 countdown shows and the agreeable patter of a chat with Dick Clark. Moten argued (and I’m paraphrasing) that Marvin Gaye’s decision to include all that socialising in the recording may have been an attempt to reinscribe Black sociality back into songs that had sprung from it. There’s a lot of it on Voodoo, and it makes sense that there would be; the record is the result of hundreds of hours of hangout sessions between D’Angelo and Questlove and other collaborators, as they jammed, listened to records and watched bootleg tour videos – as Touré described in Rolling Stone – of Gaye, James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Fela Kuti, Joni Mitchell, Prince. At the end of ‘Chicken Grease’ you can hear Questlove talking and laughing in the background.

It’s an intimation of a different kind of intimacy from the video for ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’, in which D’Angelo appeared nude against a black background, the camera never quite going lower than his hip bones: ‘Won’t you come closer to me baby?’ At concerts after that video was released, he later said, ‘a lot of ladies would just be screaming: “Take it off!” I kind of felt like … a male stripper.’ But the question about coming closer could be an invitation to listen more carefully: D’Angelo’s vocal delivery was expressive and intentional, but nevertheless often had a spoken-under-the-breath quality. Nearly every song requires close-reading. On ‘1000 Deaths’ he mumbles a hard-to-hear line and then says: ‘Y’all know what I’m saying?’ Yes. Maybe? But enunciation only does part of the work of communicating. Transmitting feeling is a different job.

‘I’m not an easy man to overstand, you feel me,’ he sings on ‘Really Love’, the first single from Black Messiah. Brent Fischer’s orchestral prelude recalls the opening scenes of a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, or the parting of clouds in a cartoon – strings like a great beam of light stabbing the sky, giving a romantic relationship the grandeur usually reserved for other acts of creation. The innuendo feels more pointed here. ‘When you touch me there, when you make me tingle/When our nectars mingle,’ D’Angelo trills. A bassoon, or some other low-frequency instrument, riffs at that lyric, like an audible eyebrow-wiggle. ‘Lay your head beside my hip,’ he asks, and the invitation to cuddle near, but not on the groin, seems like an implicit redress to the whole ‘Untitled’ spectacle.

One of my favourite performances is on the album Live at the Jazz Cafe, recorded in London in September 1995. I love D’Angelo’s rendition of ‘Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine’, partly because you can hear the voice of his former collaborator and romantic partner Angie Stone recorded so high in the mix. Stone, the hip-hop pioneer and celebrated chanteuse, who died in March, is singing background here, but she was a forefront force in his work, contributing to both Brown Sugar and Voodoo before focusing on her own solo music. Live at the Jazz Cafe may be the most alive album I know; it’s a good record to listen to in the spring, as everything is coming to life around you.

The scholar Howard Rambsy II has described how he once, as a student, tried to impress Amiri Baraka by talking about the saxophonist Albert Ayler. ‘What you heard were rumours,’ Baraka said. ‘Rumours of what Albert sounded like live. The recordings couldn’t capture his sound, his actual sound. So what you heard were ruins of his real sound.’ D’Angelo’s talent was sometimes overshadowed by rumours of his ruination. But at least we have the prodigious remnants of what he did. Some performers have had the life negotiated out of them by the time we get to hear them, and from the very beginning, there’s nothing left. There is no cataclysm in their rhythms. No great wonder and no ruins. No rumours of virtuosity, only the chit-chat of tabloids. But not everyone has so much to put on the line.

The album version of ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’ opens with studio banter. Someone, it sounds like D’Angelo, says something about cutting up the track. There are a couple of drumbeats. Raphael Saadiq’s bass plucks – and then there’s a strange interval between the sixth and ninth seconds. Complete silence. On loudspeakers, the pause sounds like a weird bit of nothing, just an extra long break between notes. But come closer: on high-fidelity headphones, the quiet is more complicated. The notes of the song seem to be playing elsewhere, filtered to high heaven, in a distant room. Maybe a backing track had been left on and happened to be recorded. In her 33⅓ book on Voodoo, Faith A. Pennick leaves open that possibility. ‘The abrupt silence sounds like it was a mistake, possibly a missed cue,’ she writes. ‘It could have been; D’Angelo chose to keep the mistakes and callouts to his players on the recordings.’

But that pause wasn’t a glitch – or not only. Because of the odd rhythm encoded in it, it feels like much more, some kind of trick-door, a portal to a different place. ‘I wanna take you away from here, baby,’ D’Angelo shouted, later in the song. Maybe the blip was permission to slip out of even the very loosest groove, to fuck up, to screw with expectations, to take a longer beat. How does it feel? That is one way it feels to be alive. D’Angelo’s music tracked the highest heights – ooh wee, doo doo wah, ooh ooh – and the marks of frailty. That three-second break is everything. You can live in that gap.