It’s 1995 and I’m riding 12 hours on a bus in Brazil, an uncomfortable, bouncy, long, overnight journey on bad roads from Sao Paolo to a coastal town called Florianópolis, many miles distant. Buried somewhere in my bag is a tape that had arrived the week before in my New Orleans mailbox. It was from a friend in the UK. ‘Listen to this’ said the handwritten scrawl on the cover. So, as the long night stretched ahead and the ceaseless panorama of dreary Brazilian jungle paraded past the bus window, I dug out the cassette, glanced at the picture on the cover of someone I’d never heard of, put the headphones on and pressed play.

I knew nothing about D’Angelo, had never heard of him. I was prepared to be underwhelmed; the name seemed pretentious – something a major label exec. would have come up with. Over the next ten or eleven hours, I listened and nodded off and woke, the music still playing, and listened and glanced at the blackness through the window and listened some more and flipped the tape over again and fell back asleep. My curiosity grew as my discomfort and fatigue deepened. And while I dozed, woke and slept, the music filled my head and my imagination, and I think it’s true to say that the contents of my skull have not been quite the same since.

It was a game changer and an epiphany. The more I heard, the more it seemed to me that the music I was hearing on this cassette tape was the missing link: the connection between music of the future, as yet unborn, and the rhythm and blues and soul of two decades past, the world of Curtis Mayfield, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and Donny Hathaway; that linear evolution that had been side-lined into oblivion by ‘crossover’, major label distribution and the ‘four on the floor’ Disco of the mid ‘70s.

In the mid nineties there was no internet yet, no googling, well at least there wasn’t for me, not in my neck of New Orleans in South Louisiana. No information, no way of finding out who was actually hands on, playing the musical instruments on this record. What was D’Angelo? Who was D’Angelo? I didn’t know but it seemed obvious that that voice was connected to those fingers on the keys, one mind at work, one brain and that there was genius there.

It’s 1996 and I’ve just arrived at John Porter’s house in Los Angeles from the airport. John, stirring a freshly brewed cup of tea, says excitedly, “I’ve been asked to produce a B.B. King record for MCA, an album of duets. Help me make up a list, the record company’s sent me the names of who they want and it’s the same people they always suggest: Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton…”

So we put their list on one side and came up with another hipper list on the other and I asked him, ’Have you heard of this guy D’Angelo? No-one really knows him, but he’s amazing. We should definitely get this guy, he’d be perfect’. He hadn’t, and really at that point, neither had anyone else. ’No’, he said, “sadly, the problem is the label won’t go for it’. It’s typical, they only want big famous names that’ll guarantee record sales”.

It’s 1997 and I’m in New York, at the recording studio for the first day of tracking. I’d arrived with John before everyone else showed up and I was at the piano, checking it out, getting the morning’s cobwebs pout of my fingers. John Porter came from the control room, stuck his head round the door with a slightly mischievous smile on his face and said,”Oh, By the way, I forgot to tell you, guess who’s coming in today? D’Angelo”. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been listening to nothing but Johnny Watson and D’Angelo for the last six months.

Minutes later D’Angelo walked in to the room, empty but for me and the mics and the instruments. He walked over to the piano, I stood and we shook hands, he said hello, smiled a shy smile, seemingly a little embarrassed to have interrupted my piano noodling. He sat behind the B3 organ and we played, grooving for about ten minutes, just the two of us in the room. Hearing those first few notes, I knew that I’d been right, that it was indeed him playing keys on the Brown Sugar record, it was one person’s brain behind all that music, music that had been spinning around and bouncing off the walls of my brain since that long bus ride in Brazil – confirmation that he was everything I suspected and more – and we hit it off.

We fooled around on the instruments and chatted and he asked me if I dug Thelonious Monk, I said I did, I really did. He said he’d only recently got hip to him and then proceeded to casually trot out some ridiculously cool Monk licks that blew my mind. That’s when I knew that not only could this guy really, really play, but that that he had something different. He was possessed of genius, the real thing. In a world where that word has been bandied about and whose currency has been so devalued, he was a genius, the real deal. And I knew even then that this was one of the few times in my life I was likely to be in the same room as that much talent.

The session got underway. The musicians filed in introducing themselves, taking their places, twiddling controls and getting sounds, drinking coffee, telling jokes. John Porter and Joe the engineer came in to make some mic adjustments. ‘What are we doing?’ I asked. John said, “Dunno yet. The song B.B. wants to to cut is ‘Ain’t Nobody Home’ by Jerry Ragavoy. But first we should just play something for everyone to warm up and get some sounds. D. just said he wants to play some Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson”.

B.B. was a delight to play music with, an absolute monster gentleman. And the rhythm section was killing too: Hugh McCracken, Steve Jordan, Leon Pendarvis and bassist Pino Palladino who had flown in from London, an old acquaintance of mine through a mutual friend, alto player, Mike Paice.

D’Angelo started singing ’Superman Lover’. The musicians fell in, one by one, and the combined instruments locked into a natural groove, everyone gracefully re-calibrating to D.’s unique sense of time as the unit, playing together for the first time, morphed into a well-oiled machine. His unique vocal phrasing, his timing and the way he approached the keyboard smothered extra layers of grease on the gears. For about twenty minutes we jammed, the band fine-tuned now like a cross between a Rolls-Royce and a ‘73 Cadillac Eldorado while the engineers made all the adjustments. We got to the end and I said fuck, that was incredible, let’s cut it. ‘Oh no,’ D. said, ‘I didn’t want to record it, I just felt like playing it!’

We got back to work, and If I remember correctly we cut ‘Ain’t Nobody Home’ in one take. We filed into the control room to listen back and everyone was pleased with what we’d got, ready to move on to the next guest artist and the next tune. I think it’s fair to say that at that time I was perhaps the only one in the room that had really familiar with D’Angelo’s music and knew that one of the things that made him so special was the way he sang his own background vocals. I suggested to D. who was sitting next to me, talking on the phone, that before he left he should stack up some falsetto harmonies on the chorus hook. He seemed pleased that someone had suggested it, almost too shy to have suggested it himself. I had a quick word in John’s ear and D. went back to the vocal mic and laid one part on top of another, quickly, effortlessly, flawlessly and brilliantly. And the song was complete. All that was left to do was to record Wardell Quezergue’s horn arrangement, a separate session that happened a few months later in New Orleans when John was in town working making a record with me at the Boiler Room studio.

D’Angelo was happy and had obviously enjoyed the morning’s work. I don’t think he’d ever done a session quite like this before, a little overawed to be in a New York studio recording with this calibre of session players, and for a legend like B.B. King, no less. He took a few selfies with B.B, introduced me to his friend, Amir, who had a great afro and his girlfriend, Angie, who was holding their new baby.

He was unhappy though with the phone conversation. It had been from his bass player, who had called to cancel – stranding D. at short notice without a bass player for an important gig. An idea had occurred to him though – a long shot. He’d been impressed by Pino’s masterful bass playing and before leaving asked him if there was any chance he might be able to change his plans and fill in.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Here’s the song:

I know – not that exciting after all of that.

Here are some more exciting things, the songs that Mark Cohn and Shawn Colvin covered:

Coexist peacefully, with patience and kindness for all.