Raphael Saadiq is back in Paris behind Jimmy Lee, his first album in almost a decade and his most personal record, shaped by addiction, loss and the death of the brother who gives the album its name. The material is dark, but the concert is anything but sombre. Even when Saadiq speaks about Jimmy Lee, the music keeps pulling the room upward.
That is what great soul music has always done. Tragedy is not erased, but transformed. Pain becomes rhythm. Grief becomes communion. Transcendence, trance and dance.
The sold-out Élysée-Montmartre barely stops moving as Saadiq draws from Sly Stone, Hendrix and Prince without ever sounding like an exercise in revivalism. The songs feel rooted in the past and entirely contemporary at the same time. Guitarist Rob Bacon is crucial to that balance, his playing recalling Eddie Hazel at his most psychedelic, stretching the arrangements outward with long, soulful, lysergic lines.
Saadiq does not treat soul as a style to preserve behind glass. He treats it as living music, capable of carrying new wounds, new sounds and new lives. People will always need a place to put their sorrow, their joy and everything in between. Music can always be that place.
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