Multiple Visions of Soul Music’s Past and Future

By NATE CHENIN -- An R&B fanatic with a glitch-prone time machine would have felt right at home in the Highline Ballroom on Wednesday night. For the rest of the crowd it was a game of capricious adjustment as Raphael Saadiq, a retro-soul specialist, and Janelle Monáe, a cyber-soul fabulist, offered multiple visions of the music’s past and future. Both artists were openly obsessive in their pursuits, and both managed to bring the room with them. Mr. Saadiq has a history of nostalgic revisionism, as a member of Tony! Toni! Toné! from the late 1980s through the mid-’90s, and more recently as a songwriter and producer. His fetching solo debut, in 2002, bore the title “Instant Vintage,” which sums up his golden ideal. But his new album — “The Way I See It,” due out on Columbia next month — pushes the retro angle more insistently. And Mr. Saadiq brought the same qualities to his show, an ostentatious throwback carried by hard-working charisma. He took the stage to a vamp from “100 Yard Dash,” one of the new album’s best tracks. His band, nine pieces counting the horns, conjured a classic Motown vibe; his attire, a cream-colored suit with a skinny black tie, served the same purpose. And on the next tune, a shuffle called “Love That Girl,” Mr. Saadiq and his backup singers engaged in a routine of snaps and half-spins, echoing the Temptations in swerve as well as style.Mr. Saadiq is unabashed about such pilfery, in the way that peacocks are unabashed about plumage. He offered a few other songs with a Temptations sound — “Just One Kiss” had the backup singer Erika Jerry ably filling in for Joss Stone, who sings it on the new album — and just as earnestly evoked Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five. When he left to change into a black suit, the band played the woozy riff from “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” a late-period Beatles tune. As a diligent entertainer, Mr. Saadiq dipped into more recent history, with a brisk medley of Tony! Toni! Toné! hits. (He seemed to treat this as an obligation.) Playing a few songs from “Instant Vintage,” he was looser: “Charlie Ray” took on a Funkadelic bounce, and “Be Here” sprawled into a psychedelic jam.What was missing there, and throughout the show, was Mr. Saadiq’s wickedly sharp electric bass playing. When he picked up the instrument for an encore, “Skyy, Can You Feel Me,” it was a reminder of strengths that had gone buried all night. By contrast, Ms. Monáe left no stone unturned in the opening set, which drew from her willfully eccentric new debut album, “Metropolis: The Chase Suite” (Bad Boy/Atlantic). A song cycle ostensibly set in the year 2719, the album casts its heroine as Cindi Mayweather, an android wanted by the authorities for crimes of human feeling. Ms. Monáe was true to that outlandish theme in performance, right down to the jerk-jointed dance moves. “Are you bold enough to reach for love?” she wailed in her second hyperkinetic song of the set, “Many Moons.” Elsewhere — on a D.J.-enhanced fanfare called “Sincerely, Jane” — she deftly connected future terrors to present-day ills. Her energy dipped only once, on a solid but uninspired version of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” sung with sparse accompaniment from her guitarist, Kellindo. But that was hardly a momentum killer: the mini-set ended a couple of tunes later with Ms. Monáe surfing the crowd, calling up emotions with no time stamp besides the present. SOURCE:NYT.COM