Behind the Beat: D'Angelo, the Soulquarians and Electric Lady
D'Angelo died on 14 October 2025, aged 51. A year on, the best way to remember him is to listen closely, and no record rewards close listening more than Voodoo, or the scene that grew up around it at Electric Lady Studios in New York.
A studio, not a session
Voodoo came out in January 2000, almost five years after Brown Sugar made D'Angelo's name. Much of that gap was spent at Electric Lady, the Greenwich Village studio Jimi Hendrix built. Over several years D'Angelo, Questlove of The Roots, engineer Russell Elevado and a rotating cast of musicians including bassist Pino Palladino made it their base. They often spent hours studying old soul and funk records, concert footage and bootlegs before turning those ideas into long jams.
Sessions that long turned the studio into a meeting place. Erykah Badu moved her own sessions there in May 1999 for what became Mama's Gun. Common and Bilal were making records in the same building. Musicians drifted between rooms and between albums, and the loose collective became known as the Soulquarians: D'Angelo, Questlove, keyboardist James Poyser, producer J Dilla, Q-Tip, Badu and Common, with trumpeter Roy Hargrove and others moving in and out.
Unlike much late-1990s R&B, the sessions put live ensemble playing ahead of polished, programmed production, with songs often built from extended jams rather than conventional studio arrangements.
Late on purpose
What ties these records together is a feel. Detroit producer J Dilla programmed his drums without snapping them to a grid, so kicks and snares landed a fraction early or late. To Questlove and D'Angelo, that sounded more human than perfect time, not less.
Questlove was known for precise, heavy timekeeping, and playing Dilla's looseness by hand meant unlearning some of it. He later described what drew him to D'Angelo's music as an "inebriated execution thing" that they had both taken from Dilla. On Voodoo, Palladino's bass sits even further back than the drums, so the whole groove seems to lean away from the beat.
Listen for it on "Chicken Grease" or "The Root." Nothing is out of time. It just takes its time. On "The Root," guitarist Charlie Hunter plays the bass line and the guitar part at once on a custom eight-string instrument, a part that, according to engineer Russell Elevado, grew out of jamming Hendrix songs with D'Angelo during the sessions.
What came out of it
Voodoo went to number one on the Billboard 200 and won Best R&B Album at the 2001 Grammys. Mama's Gun followed in November 2000, and many critics heard the albums as companion pieces: the same studio, many of the same players, the same unhurried pocket, with Badu writing more directly than she had on her debut.
The connections run back further, too. In 1998, D'Angelo sang with Lauryn Hill on "Nothing Even Matters," the duet on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. At this year's Grammys, Hill performed it with his band, The Vanguard, and told the audience she and D'Angelo had never got to sing it on stage together.
Where the feel went
J Dilla died in February 2006. A year later, pianist Robert Glasper's In My Element included "J Dillalude," a medley of Dilla beats played by an acoustic jazz trio at Q-Tip's suggestion. It's one of the clearest examples of how the Electric Lady approach to time crossed over into jazz, and it pointed toward a generation of players for whom playing behind the beat became second nature.
And if Charlie Hunter's playing on "The Root" catches your ear, his trio's 1995 debut, Bing, Bing, Bing!, shows the groove he brought into that room.
Put it on
Brown Sugar introduced D'Angelo. Voodoo is where he and his friends rebuilt how soul music could feel, and its influence still runs through R&B and jazz a quarter of a century later. We have both on vinyl, along with Mama's Gun. Put Voodoo on, drop the needle on "Chicken Grease," and listen to how far back the groove sits. That was the point.