Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary.

A key influence on neo-soul was the hip-hop producer J Dilla, whose gift to music was to approach musical time in a new way: to remove notes, to make patterns repeat over much longer stretches than pop music would normally allow – over 32 bars rather than four – with the result that, to ears attuned to greater regularity, it sounded somehow wrong, as well as right. (Should you wish to know more, I commend to you a book from earlier this year, called Dilla Time, which explains it all in more detail than you perhaps need.)

That combination of the familiar and the unexpected flowed through Badu’s performance: chords that landed in odd places, unexpected melodic shifts, the way she let her voice slip into wordless expressions – sighs and shivers and shrugs – before pulling back to the lyrics and the melody. She communicated as much through sound as through word. But it was not spiky: it was lush, gorgeous and sensual, and her band were expert: ‘On and On’ was smoky and easeful, ‘Window Seat’ was like being wrapped in cashmere.