Charles Ray Wiggins (Oakland, California 1966) was 18 when he auditioned as bassist for Sheila E’s band. While waiting for his turn, he invented the stage name of Raphael. Days later they call him back to tell him he got the job, but he doesn’t even remember giving that name. After a few weeks and the young musician is already following Sheila E, who opens the concerts of Prince’s Parade tour in Europe and Japan. Playing every night with Prince and Sheila E is a baptism of fire, Saadiq today says that that was his university.
Raphael adds the surname Saadiq (“man of his word” in Arabic) to his stage name several years later and becomes known as part of the rnb trio Tony! Toni! Toné !, a very successful boyband in the United States that re-proposes the harmonies of the vocal groups of the sixties in a funk and hip hop key.
Tony’s experience exhausted! Toni! Toné !, Raphael Saadiq establishes himself as author and producer, and becomes a point of reference for the entire scene of the so-called Nu soul, the new soul of the nineties. He writes and produces for practically everyone: from Whitney Houston to Mary J. Blige, from Tlc to En Vogue, from Erykah Badu to Jill Scott. As an author, arranger and producer, Saadiq has a magical touch: he manages to be always up to date but at the same time out of fashion. Fine, a piece he wrote and produced for Whitney Houston in 2001, is an example of this sensitivity. The skeleton is that of a seventies funk piece (like As by Stevie Wonder) but inside is all the honey, sensuality and commercial awareness of 90s rnb. Houston herself, not always sober and dry interpreter, sings it without smudging: she follows the groove and harmonizes with the choirs, always precise as a clock. Fine, like so many other things written and produced by Raphael Saadiq, it has all the characteristics of a vintage car while still being factory fresh, still with the plastic on the leather seats.
When Saadiq comes to produce his album in 2011 Stone Rollin’ he has already meditated for a long time on the concepts of retro and classic: his first solo album, in 2002, is called Instant vintage (a title that is already a program); The second one, Ray Ray, is a seventies pastiche inspired by the soundtracks of blaxploitation films; And The way I see it (2008) is an attempt (mostly successful) to clone the Motown sound of the sixties in the laboratory.
Stone Rollin’ it is therefore the point of arrival of a long process of rarefaction and sublimation. Raphael Saadiq wants to get to the black roots of American popular music, but he also wants to have fun and entertain: take off his jacket as a producer and arranger, pick up the guitar and put on a great show.
“I wanted to write songs that would give satisfaction to my bass and my guitar,” he said in a 2011 interview referring to the ten songs that make up Stone Rollin’, and just attacks the drag Heart attack you understand perfectly what he means. The sound is vintage, deliberately dirty and grainy, but the piece is from now. It seems too many things all together: inside is Chuck Berry, there is Little Richard, there is that moment in the history of American music in which blues and gospel are electrified, merge and become something else. Yet it is not modern, it is a contemporary pop piece, it is here and now.
Each piece of this record could be a single, a single forgotten by history, perhaps stuck in some dusty juke box and fished out by an archaeologist of soul. Saadiq dances like a tightrope walker on the invisible line that divides nostalgia retro from the true classic: every time you think you hear something by Stevie Wonder, the sound changes and it becomes Sly Stone, it becomes Prince, it becomes the Isley Brothers. The voice and style, however, are those of a 21st century champion.
Stone Rollin’ it is also a masterpiece of that forgotten art which is the sequencing: that is the order to be given to the songs within an album. From Heart attack, pure rock’n’roll of the origins, we gradually arrive at the last piece, The answer, which, as critic Jim DeRogatis wrote, sounds like “the Moody Blues who miraculously find funk”.
Stone Rollin’ as well as an exercise on the concept of classic soul it is a reflection on the black origins of rock’n’roll. If you want, you can read it as a retrofuturist fantasy: how would rock’n’roll have developed if it hadn’t been, at a certain point, “confiscated” by whites?
Raphael Saadiq
Stone Rollin’
Columbia, 2011
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