![A composite image of Vernon Reid and D'Angelo. Reid [right] cups his fingers to his ear as he performs with his PRS signature model. D'Angelo holds both hands on his mic stand and wears a black sleeveless T and black headband.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Xh9isFyYgH7eU7S24hpw3U-1920-80.jpg.webp)
The greats are never afraid to break the rules of musical convention or to rewrite them entirely. They, too, might be operating under the influence of those who came before them, but they dare to take those influences somewhere radical – D’Angelo, the neo-soul phenom who died last week, aged 51, is a case in point.
To quote MusicRadar’s resident professor of music, Ethan Hein, D’Angelo was “wildly unconventional” to say the least. He did things that no one else could do. He would play with the physical architecture of rhythm itself, and he would not only get away with it, this radicalism would give its sound a groove and feel as good as a thumbprint.
If you’re going to do something similar to what D’Angelo was doing with the beat on Really Love, well, you’d better know what you’re doing.
“The snare drum on beat two is a little early, while the layered finger snap on beat two is extremely late,” writes Hein, in his forensic analysis of D’Angelo’s work. “The snap is multiply overdubbed, so it couldn’t possibly be an accident. The kick drums in the final beat are also extremely late.
“In the hands of lesser musicians, this much misalignment would simply sound sloppy. In the hands of these players, it’s perfectly imperfect – the precise right amount of wrong.”
Vernon Reid, the Living Colour guitarist, knows exactly what Hein is talking about, and joining MusicRadar from his home in New York – the Zoom connection going in and out because the whole of the NYC is online “falling in love with their LLMs” – he says D’Angelo’s death is an immeasurable loss for music.
Even though we lost D’Angelo far too soon, his influence made will be heard across popular music for years to come. It will be everlasting. Generations of musicians will be looking how they can follow suit and introduce the right among of 'wrong' in their compositions.
“I mean, in reality, he made three albums and some singles,” says Reid. “But the impact of the records – the sheer impact of Brown Sugar, that first album, and then Voodoo, and then Black Messiah – is going to permeate music from now on, his influence as a vocalist, but as well as his feel. It is incredibly sad.”
D’Angelo’s feel is what really blew Reid’s mind. It was his appetite for rhythmic adventurism that caught his ear. He, too, attributes that sensibility to hip-hop’s Mozart of unorthodox beat-making, the late J Dilla, but also to the Al Green and the golden era of Memphis soul.
“I was really struck by one feature of his music, that whole behind the beat thing, that’s very much like the the J Dilla kind of hip-hop behind the beat thing,” says Reid. “There’s a whole thing that Dilla Time has affected. It’s affected R&B. It’s affected jazz. It’s amazing. But D’Angelo had that natively, this whole behind the beat feel – way behind the beat – very much like the music that came out of Memphis, very much like Al Green with the Hodges Brothers [Hi Rhythm Section]. It was very much that approach and I found it remarkable.”
Reid was lucky enough to have worked with D’Angelo, however briefly. The pair met in the mid ‘90s and ended up in the studio collaborating on a track for the Set It Off soundtrack, the heist caper movie starring Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett-Smith.
He was aware of Living Colour, and he was a fan, and it was really great meeting him. Then I got the call to do the session
“I was thinking about the couple of times I met him. I met him initially in the Hollywood Hills,” recalls Reid. “There was a party for him, when Brown Sugar came out. There was like a celebrity get together and I was invited to go with the writer Trey Ellis, and I met him. And he was aware of Living Colour, and he was a fan, and it was really great meeting him. Then I got the call to do the session.”
The movie was a success. Reid’s session less so – at least not financially. He didn’t get paid for the work. Their track didn’t join the likes of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, En Vogue and Busta Rhymes on the movie’s official soundtrack. But nonetheless remembers it fondly. D’Angelo was “as high as a Georgia pine”. Reid played some blues guitar, and he has still got got a tape of the session that is one of his prized possessions.
“It starred Queen Latifah. It was like a crew of bank robbers or something,” says Reid. “D’Angelo was doing some soundtrack work on it, so I got called in for a session, and it was basically myself and D’ and the track, and it was really, really lovely. And in fact, there was a cassette. It’s kind of a blues [track]. We did a a blues thing, and I have a cassette of the session, just a rough mix of us playing, and it’s fabulous!”
Reid has pondered whether to release that tape. If ever there was the time, now would be the time. However unvarnished the mix, people need to hear this.
What they need to know – about D’Angelo, about J Dilla, and their collaborators in the Soulquarians – is where these 21st-century experimentalists got the idea to manipulate rhythm like this in the first place.
That is a whole rabbit-hole to go down, and it’ll take you back to gospel, soul, blues and Jazz. “It leads us all back to Africa at the end of the day,” says Reid. “It’s a feel. Thelonious Monk had it. They are original sources.”
What J Dilla did was take those sources and “nudge” the beat backwards, Reid explains. And remember those sources were already behind the beat. What the likes of D’Angelo and J Dilla were doing was exploring just how further behind the beat you could be and still stay in the pocket. In a sense, their question was: how big is the pocket?
“Interestingly enough, J Dilla exaggerated a feel that was present in the culture, in gospel music,” says Reid. “It was present in blues. I mean, it’s right there if you listen to the timing of Howlin’ Wolf records. The feel of Howlin’ Wolf records? It’s right there, and it’s different. It’s a little different than, say, George Clinton’s ‘on the 1.’ It’s this other sort of feel.
J Dilla exaggerated a feel that was present in the culture, in gospel music. The feel of Howlin’ Wolf records? It’s right there
“Because that funk ‘on the 1’ is absolutely ‘Don’t get it twisted!’ Right? It’s incredible what that is. But this other feel, this kind of super laid-back [feel], it’s behind. J Dilla took jazz samples, samples of these old records, and he just nudged them with a little more swing to make that feel even more obvious or perceptible. You feel they’re behind.
“It’s incredibly influential and very powerful – certainly trip-hop, a lot of the backpack rap, the People Under The Stars, all that stuff. And D’Angelo was right there in a live sense because, again, he’s someone that comes right out the church, too, and there’s that direct connection.”
You can read our full interview with Vernon Reid coming soon to MusicRadar. Reid's new solo album, Hoodoo Telemetry, is out now via Players Club.
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