Bilal blows minds with a stellar London set and Questlove on drums

Summer touring schedules make it entirely possible to see the same artist twice in quick succession. So it proves with Bilal. Just over a week ago the singer was one of the headliners at the A To Jazz festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and here he is on a two-night run at the Jazz Café, the north London venue he has played many times in a career spanning over two decades.

In the early 2000s the Philadelphia native, now a sprightly 40 something, garnered critical acclaim rather than commercial success for his debut album, 1st Born Second, as well as subsequent releases such as Airtight’s Revenge, both of which revealed an excellent composer and singer as deeply rooted in jazz, as heard on his extensive work with Robert Glasper, as he was in soul. Yet Bilal also collaborated with hip-hop heroes such as Common and The Roots, and in the evening’s grand coup de theatre the latter’s drummer-filmmaker Questlove makes a surprise guest appearance, delivering a brief big-up for Bilal before sitting in with the three-piece band. We didn’t get that in Sofia. We also didn’t get an audience, engaged as it was, that knew every song on the setlist. The bustling Camden crowd can be seen mouthing what amounts to Bilal’s greatest hits, certainly for solid kudos rather than gold discs: ‘Soul Sista’, with its slow motion swagger, ‘When Will You Call’, with its misty-eyed romanticism, and ‘Sometimes’, with its irresistibly slinky hook and pithy lyrics on relationship woes. Yes, we all wish we saw the exit signs first.

But as the gig progresses it becomes clear that beyond the potent cohesion of the stellar combo – Joe Blacks (drums), Tony Whitfield (bass) Randy Runyon (guitar) – that can seamlessly pivot from hard backbeat to fluid swing – there is also the character of Bilal as well as the singer that comes into play. He has truly salty humour. His change of tone, from an angelic falsetto to a demonically gruff, right from the gut holler, is an essential part of his artistic and personal make-up that puts him in a long lineage of effortlessly world-weary, snarly blues men who might cuss you out as easily as they’d hold you up when you’re down. There is something unfiltered in his nature that duly invokes Muddy Waters just as the finer points of his phrasing recall Jon Hendricks.

As if to make his pool of inspirations yet clearer he dedicates ‘I Really Don’t Care’ to Ahmad Jamal, the piano legend whose riffing was sampled on Nas’ ‘The World Is Yours’, which is now used as the basis of the track. Eagle-eared punters would have also heard guitarist Runyon slide the melody of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’ into a fabulous solo on ‘Back To Love’, but the captivating trawl through black music history reaches a climax on a mesmeric version of Yarborough & Peoples’ ‘Don’t Stop The Music’, which has the kind of serpentine rhythmic grace and tightly wound funk to make it ideal for a band with such a firm grip on the principle of tension and release. This is a performance that serves as a reminder of why audiences have stayed faithful to Bilal over long years. He has the band, the songs and the voice to command that loyalty, and to deliver, according to his own gospel, somethin’ for the people.