Music Review: Angie Stone charms, chides during powerful Memphis concert

Photo by By Chris Desmond, Special to The Commercial Appeal

Angie Stone

Angie Stone is many things: poet, actress, clothing designer — and, of course, one of the most highly regarded contemporary soul singers. Whatever she does, though, Stone can’t help but being herself: feisty, funny, thoughtful and emotional.

During a Sunday night concert at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, Stone was all that, serving up a set that was musically vibrant, long on audience interaction, and punctuated by heartfelt raps about everything from Barack Obama to Jesus Christ to modern day romance.

Photo by By Chris Desmond

Angie Stone

Striding onto stage as her five-piece band vamped, Stone was greeted as “a fellow sistah” by an energized and largely female audience.

Long before her career as a solo singer took flight in the late ’90s, Stone was one of the pioneering ladies of hip-hop, and she showcased her rapid-fire rhyming skills on an opening “Time of the Month.”

Flashing a 1,000-watt smile, the 47-year-old South Carolina native was at ease even when she wasn’t singing or rapping, charming and chiding the audience and her band in equal measure through the night.

“I need you to make it a little more soulful than that — we’re in Memphis,” Stone playfully admonished her musicians as they kicked off the intro to “Everyday.” After the band dispensed some languid grooves, Stone then turned to the crowd and asked: “You understand this kind of soul, don’t you?”

“Everyday,” a narrative of domestic drama, played as tribute to the women in the crowd, with the audience delivering the song’s “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain back at Stone.

But, it was her next offering, “Pissed Off” (“This is my anthem for the ladies”), that really brought the women at the Cannon Center to their feet.

With its sharp, piercing lyrics about a stifling relationship (“So busy accusing me, when it’s your insecurity”) it had the audience howling in recognition at numerous points. As Stone joked at song’s end: “I was real pissed off when I wrote that!”

While the set list largely drew from her back catalog, Stone also highlighted several tracks from her most recent album and debut for the revived Stax label, The Art of Love and War.

In fact, her reading of the album’s standout “Sometimes” — a crosscurrent of competing emotions (“Sometimes I want to love you, sometimes I want to fight you”) — was one of the more forceful performances of the evening. As was her reworking of the R&B groover “Baby,” originally done on record as a duet with Betty Wright, but remade into a vocal show-stopper with the help of a pair of background singers.

Stone’s backing band — led by keyboardist and native Memphian Jonathan Richmond — was in fine form all night, and nowhere was their playing more moving than during the concert’s centerpiece: Stone’s cover of soul legend Curtis Mayfield’s “The Makings of You.”

A lush R&B gem, she turned the song into a personal tour de force, praising Mayfield as one of the forgotten giants and laying her own claim as torchbearer for his music.

As Stone told the audience, she’s merely “trying to hold it down” for all the true soul singers and fans. On this night, Stone held it down, and then some.

— Bob Mehr: 529-2517

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