“It’s unbelievable to think that it’s been exactly one year since ‘A Seat at the Table,’ ” Solange Knowles, dressed in simple, regal white, told the crowd at a sold-out Radio City Music Hall on Monday night, before explaining how she’d intentionally released the record with little lead-up or announcement. The album arrived for audiences seventy-two hours after she’d submitted it to her record label: “Because it wasn’t about having a long rollout. I had to release the album, to heal for myself.”
The snap release certainly didn’t hurt. “A Seat at the Table,” the thirty-one-year-old Knowles’s fourth album since emerging, in 2002, landed to near universal acclaim, piercing music circles like a modern-day “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” It was dubbed the best album of 2016 by Pitchfork, Spin, and Vibe, earned the singer her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, and snagged a Grammy for Best R. & B. Performance. After many reinventions, Knowles had found her sound through the protest movements of the moment, singing candidly and gorgeously about identity, culture, and empowerment from a ground-level vantage. Her campaign since the album’s release, which has included performance installations at the Guggenheim, has been a constellation of art, videos, and staging concepts meant to match the idiosyncrasies of “A Seat at the Table.” On Monday evening, she ornamented her performance with lavish string and horn sections, writhing dance routines, and apoplectic vocal flourishes that blew out the contours of the original songs.
Before Knowles appeared, she offered up a trio of openers who helped an eager audience to settle in. Chassol, a French pianist and composer, was the first, and the best, of the bunch. He has mastered a hypnotizing audio-visual technique: pairing audio from self-shot documentary footage with fluttering Rhodes keys and woodwinds, classical piano, and jazz drums, for an inspiring, original sound. Chassol played piano along with a drummer while clips of Carnival in Martinique, his parents’ native island, looped above him. The Sun Ra Arkestra came next, playing glistening jazz fusion in tribute to their namesake—the group’s appearance was more miss than hit, even when a procession down the aisle roused onlookers. Earl Sweatshirt, a supremely gifted rapper who broke out at a mere sixteen years old, raced through brooding tangles of rap verses with a self-aware smirk. “We got thirty minutes to rap, and then it’s Solange time!” he joked. Knowles is to be commended for her curatorial eye, but the crowd was there to see her, and no distraction would placate them. As the openers wrapped, a fan behind me quipped, “Are we back on Earth now? Did we leave space?”
On her record and onstage, Knowles presents familiar terrain threaded with thrilling new possibilities, akin to playing Sonic 3 as Knuckles—subbing out a core ingredient in a familiar dish. She opened with “Rise,” accompanied by two supporting vocalists who were present throughout the set, and the trio effortlessly retained the song’s chiselled three-part harmonies. One might overlook it while listening to the album, but this stacked arrangement, when performed live, recalled even more explicitly the modernized girl-group harmonies perfected by Destiny’s Child. Solange’s midrange tone doesn’t just resemble her older sister Beyonce’s; similarly, it begs to be braided between two others. As Solange slipped into “Weary,” her drummer shifted between his drum kit and an electric pad that triggered kick samples (which almost always land better to ears reared on rap drums). She snaked through the song’s airy harmonies, leaving gaps for the audience to fill in ad libs; this was a crowd who’d spent the past year learning “Seat” inside and out, and they itched to show their mastery.
If the album has a central thesis, it’s the nagging pursuit of the omniscient, unnamed “it” described on “Cranes in the Sky”—the “it” that Solange tries to drink, smoke, dance, shop, work, sleep, sex, and read away. The single is still revelatory: a song about depression that floats like the dark clouds it describes. “If you need to, sing it away . . .” she invited the crowd as the song bloomed open. The ticket price to a Solange Knowles show isn’t for vocal feats—it’s for a singularly relatable perspective, an emotional dog whistle. Still, when she nailed the Mariah Carey-esque falsettos that sparkle toward the song’s close, fans roared her on. She followed with “Mad,” her ode to being angry and defying the burden of explanation. “I’m not really allowed to be mad, but you are, but you are, but you are allowed to be mad,” she improvised, before transitioning into “F.U.B.U.,” a B-side with a catchphrase just as weighty: “This shit is for us.” “You,” “us”—Knowles’s breakthrough as a songwriter has been her fierce wielding of these pronouns, and they struck even more forcefully as she addressed her cult in person.
As such, there was a curious tension throughout the evening, acknowledged figuratively, when the deep red floodlights gave way to blue or green tones; and literally, when Solange paused to recognize her earlier albums, thanking her fans “no matter when you joined me on this journey.” That journey took a turn in 2011, when Knowles left Houston for Bed-Stuy and eased into an Obama-era bohemia, comprised of black artsy types who bounced fluidly between Brooklyn’s gentrified hubs and its African-American enclaves, a kind of second coming of Spike Lee’s move to Fort Greene, in the nineteen-eighties. Her sister’s shadow didn’t reach Brooklyn’s underground, Knowles found: she walked the streets unrecognized by those not in the know, and gathered a Warholian crew of like-minded juniors who further validated her presence on the scene. At the time, the Post fawned over her chic day-to-days: dropping her son off at public school in the morning, and d.j.ing at Brooklyn Bowl at night. Peter Shapiro, that venue’s co-owner, summed up the appeal, describing her “connection to R. & B.” and “the other side of her musical taste that runs more Brooklyn-indie-rock band.”
The moment culminated with “True,” from 2012, an EP of nimble dance-pop R. & B., released on the independent label Terrible Records. The record was her best to date, and perked trendy ears with hints of new-wave bop and gobs of indie credibility. But the tightrope soon stretched too thin: you can’t choose your fans, but hipsters can still make for annoying ones. On Monday, as Knowles performed songs from “True,” they struggled to maintain the achey immediacy of “Seat.” Artists change direction all the time, but it’s rare for material released so recently to feel so distant from its author. The tinny, eighties-era drum samples and drone keyboards of “Losing You” and “Lovers in a Parking Lot” felt lower-stakes than the warm bass and brass of her newer work—these songs were true to their time, but also distinctly of it. Scanning the crowd, it was easy to tell who had joined the journey when.
Solange dug even further back for “T.O.N.Y.,” from 2008, a straight-ahead soul single about a side guy disrupting a steady relationship. Knowles has written her strongest material about universal, shared conditions, rather than the one-on-one love stories of pop habit. An artist’s true test is discovering how she is most uniquely useful, and with “Seat,” Knowles accomplished just that. Her earlier work, while undeniably fun, could have been excised from the set without much loss: she essentially released her début album after the first three.
As the concert wound to a close, ending with “Don’t Touch My Hair,” Knowles and her ensemble broke into bursts of dance. She gets more out of a tight writhe, a thrust of an elbow, a stretched, slow-motion lean, a quick stomp of three high-knees, or a twelve-second twerk, than many of her peers get out of sweaty, song-long routines. Her moves are tightly coiled and boldly expressive, with a recognizable affection for well-known Alvin Ailey numbers—remember that this daughter of showbiz parents is classically trained in ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance. Knowles turned to conduct a few swells from her horn and string sections before her bandmate took to the microphone: “Give it up for the choreographer, the creator of this show, Miss Solange Knowles!” Fans streamed out of Radio City and onto Sixth Avenue feeling fed, and eager to maintain the night’s gleam. “We should go to a rooftop bar,” one patron goaded a friend. “I know two good ones!”