D’Angelo may have done the very first solo Verzuz – I mean, who wants to fight him? – but he brought in a very special guest musician to start his performance in the Apollo on Saturday night.
It would be Keyon Harrold, the veteran trumpeter and member of D’Angelo’s band, whose 14-year-old black son, Keyon Harrold Jr., is falsely accused of stealing an iPhone from a white woman in September. Stole Arlo Hotel in Soho.
No explanation was needed, as it went live in the Apollo Theater – the mecca for African-American artists. It was a moment – as Black History Month unfolds – to remind you how far we still have to go, with this leading musician, Harrold, whom he has introduced four times through a ‘very, very dear friend’. Grammy winner on the most historic black music stages.
As he went on to introduce ‘my brother, a great musician’, it was very clear that this was the moment the star took back to introduce himself to the masses again by showing the humanity that is in all of us exists – also the father of a 14-year-old child who was allegedly assaulted by 22-year-old Miya Ponsetto, nicknamed “Soho Karen”, because he did nothing wrong.
Before D’Angelo even sang a note, he had already made a statement.
Then they started with a song that was going on, and D’Angelo declared that “love is a thing that makes the world turn.” And while Harrold was ringing his horn with the neo-soul man on the keys – Lena Waithe described it very accurately as MTV ” Unplugged ‘vibes” in the comments – it was a moment that resolved any “Verzuz” between people has.
The battle was apparently over before it really started in this latest installment of the Verzuz series which was one of the most popular virtual series to come out of the COVID era.
After DJ Scratch performed the party – with stars such as Common, Timbaland, Snoop Dogg and Babyface – D’AngeIo took the stage at around 22:00.
But although this Verzuz was labeled ‘D’Angelo & Friends’, he did not really cast traces against anyone else. It was all about him.
And who can argue with that? Just seeing D’Angelo – rocking with a brown hat and matching do-cloth to go with his black faux fur coat – was a gift for the fans who have been waiting since he last released his “Black Messiah” – album dropped in the final days of 2014.
And D did bring out some “Friends”: Redman and Method Man showed up to drop rhymes on “Left & Right”, from D’Angelo’s masterpiece “Voodoo” from 2000. And the two-time Grammy winner HER showed up to do the Lauryn Hill part of ‘Nothing Even Matters’, from the 1998 classic ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’.
In the end, it did not feel like a real Verzuz, with no one for D’Angelo to really fight. The obvious choice would have been Maxwell. Just when Erykah Badu and Jill Scott went to diva in an early Verzuz diva last year, it would have been great to see D’Angelo deliver his best against his top neo-soul man competition.
After all, it’s hard to argue with anything that makes you feel a brown sugar sweetness on a COVID Saturday night.