Maxwell blends R&B’s past, present
Singer’s Riverside show sumptuous
Decades of evidence suggest that being a soul man is synonymous with being a lover man, and on Saturday night Maxwell contributed to the evidence by emerging from a darkened part of the Riverside Theater stage in well-tailored evening attire, looking sharper than Bruno Mars and not saddled with a cloying, unsexy hit like “The Lazy Song.”
Gliding instead through the sensuously sad farewell of “Pretty Wings,” the Brooklyn native further demonstrated that a 44-year-old neo-soul man can also be a lover man.
Actually, compared to more blatantly contemporary male R&B singers — the oft-immature Usher, the overly effortful Robin Thicke and the arrogantly embittered Chris Brown — Maxwell has greater qualifications to be a lover man.
Seven of his qualifications were the members of his fully live backing band, which adeptly generated the mood music — not so much background sound as surround sound — a lover man needs to help him get what he wants most.
Within that mood music, and above it so he could be heard, Maxwell sang as if he could never lose his voice and as if he’d spent years taking detailed notes on what history’s best soul men had done before him.
In his stark, sumptuous cover of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” he hugged the lullaby tempo with a falsetto that, in steadiness although not quite in sensitivity, aspired to the superficial vulnerability and spider-web strength of Smokey Robinson’s upper register.
In the peppy, confident combination of 1970s pop-soul grooves and late-1980s new jack swing that was “Sumthin’ Sumthin’,” he approached the round tones of Stevie Wonder at his least lugubrious.
And, in the midst of the R. Kelly-written “Fortunate” and at several other points during his set, he grabbed hold of the raspy and half-crazed simulation of a yowling cat in heat that the late Prince mastered as perhaps no other lover man could (or would be willing to) do.
Maxwell should’ve switched to Wonder and Prince tempos more often, because he relied too much on the velvety midtempo that can be a lover man’s shelter and crutch.
Besides frequent recourse to more than one speed, a lover man ought to have stamina, and Maxwell didn’t last long at all: his part of the night was over in about 70 or 75 minutes.
That’s counting his copious expressions of gratitude — and the talismanic repetition of the phrase “21 years”: the length of his career so far — toward an audience so appreciative that it deserved more of everything from him.