![]() ![]() In what seemed like a scripted moment, he said: “I challenge America, I challenge the world, to let hatred go, to let racism go. He advocated more accessibility worldwide for the disabled, and he called for better gun control, pointing to a family in the audience that lost a daughter in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Wonder was voluble between songs, joking about tabloid reports that he dismissed as rumors but also doing some preaching. ![]() But he was always there to chime back in on higher, more difficult variations. Now and then, backup singers - including India.Arie, who came and went in multiple regal costumes - took over verses that Mr. Onstage, he let the best riffs stretch out, savoring the danceable constructions he had set in motion decades ago, as the audience members, many of whom were around for the original album release, stood and shimmied. All over the album, he ingeniously meshes syncopated ascending and descending lines, as he did in the upbeat “Sir Duke,” the doleful “Pastime Paradise” and the kinetic “I Wish.” Wonder’s good intentions and boundless musicality. What has held it together, then and now, is Mr. Wonder brought out what he called a “thumbtack piano,” an upright with thumbtacks in its hammers to make each note go plink). The album traverses styles there are blues, soul, rock, funk, chamber pop, bossa nova, big-band salsa, jazzy ballads, even honky-tonk country (in “Ebony Eyes,” for which Mr. It also balances hurt and healing its opening song, the beguiling “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” warns, “The force of evil plans to make you its possession” unless love can conquer hate. Wonder pounding the top of his piano with his fist, singing the title again and again with gospelly insistence.Īlong with the radio-friendly tracks the album is widely remembered for - “Sir Duke,” “Isn’t She Lovely,” “I Wish,” “Pastime Paradise” - it holds exploratory songs like “Contusion,” a jazz-rock instrumental in tricky shifting meters, and “Black Man,” an anti-racism history lesson in funk. One title may sum it up: “Joy Inside My Tears,” a ballad that, when he got to it at Madison Square Garden, had Mr. Its songs touch on social ills, individual joys, faith, love, war, music, birth, memories, fears and hopes. But it’s also a long, sprawling experience: 21 tracks that originally filled two LPs and a four-song EP. Wonder has called it the album he is most happy with. It won a Grammy as album of the year and is widely cited as a favorite by musicians and pop listeners. “Songs in the Key of Life” was beloved from the moment it appeared. But the concert was a triumph: not a simple nostalgia trip but a return visit to songs and ideas that still matter. He laughingly forgot a lyric, played the wrong harmonica for a moment, sang just enough sour notes to show that he’s human and suffered numerous microphone glitches. Wonder showed that his lifelong melding of serious intentions, omnivorous musical sophistication and jubilant execution was utterly sure. Wonder’s voice was bright and true, snaking through the melismas that successive generations of singers have emulated and rising easily through every uplifting key change he had built into the songs. He and a huge band, directed by the keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, had played his 1976 album, “Songs in the Key of Life,” from start to finish, 38 years later and every bit as vibrant. “Yes! We did it!” Stevie Wonder exulted, and rightly so, about three hours into his concert at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night. ![]()
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