at Celebrity Theatre, Phoenix, AZ.
OK, jaded 1's, when's the last time you woke up at 5:30 in the morning anxious from excitement over the maturity date on a ticket you'd been holding? Yeah, well, after seeing a little bit of this cat on VH1, and after hearing reports from the North Sea Jazz Festival gig, I was well amped up to experience this live show. The verdict?
D'Angelo turned the revolving stage of the Celebrity Theatre into some kind of super sexy hovercraft mothership of bad ass monster funk! Un-be-freaking-LEEvable!
Do NOT go see this show if the idea of hundreds of 20-something ladies screaming, swooning, fawning, and climbing over to you to get closer to the stage annoys you.
Do NOT go see this show if the idea of monstrous jamz, featuring an incredibly tight and very jazzy horn section, and hands down the hardest working, best-rehearsed background vocal crew in the business turns you off.
Do NOT go see this show if a superTIGHT rhythm section, featuring that Vlade Divac muthafuka Pino on bass, as well as 2 guitars, 2 Rhodes, and the unbelievable mountain of funkiness ?estlove pounding the skins is not your idea of a good time.
Do NOT go see this show if you're allergic to sweat, 30 minute reworkings of album trax, blistering horn lines, mind blowing vocal percussion, freaky costuming, and 2.5 hours of non-stop, intense, megafunk, (in which D'angelo tearing up ?estlove's drumkit was only the midway point in intensity.)
Otherwise, MAKE IT A POINT to see this show at all costs. Seeing any other soul show, at this point in time, seems to me a little like watching a sprinter besides Michael Johnson, or a boxer besides Roy Jones Jr., or a baller other than Michael Jordan. This is the real shit, so hot it made the Mars-like surface temperature of Phoenix seem temporarily cool by comparison! And even if you're one of the ones who thought his album was too minimalistic for all the hype, the live show WILL make you a believer, I'd wager.
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