Angie Stone was no overnight success. By the time 2001’s Mahogany Soul made her a star, she’d logged two decades in the game, starting out in pioneering all-girl rap trio the Sequence, before passing through went-nowhere R&B groups like Devox and Vertical Hold and writing and singing with other artists (including D’Angelo, her former lover and father of their son, Michael). Once Clive Davis’s Arista Records signed her in 1999, those years of experience set her apart from the neo-soul pack, having worn a powerful grain into her rich, agile voice, and steeping her music in soul’s deep history.
Her debut for Arista, Black Diamond, retooled lush 70s soul for the new century: Green Grass Vapors – a love song to the sweet leaf with Stone “higher than the Thunder Dome” – was from the same funky swamp as D’Angelo’s Chicken Grease, its smouldering guitar like a moaning panther. A remarkable reading of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, meanwhile, mastered the track’s breathless, staccato chorus without breaking a sweat, channelling Gaye’s existential agonies with every holler to an oblivious lord.
