When I saw Kelela live in 2023, I remember finding something quite cat-like about her onstage performance. Her movements were frantic yet sharp, and in some instances, languid; she seemed always keenly aware of her body, even in a state of relaxation. This is how I imagined the D.C. native’s physical choreography while listening to her live album, In the Blue Light, recorded at New York’s hallowed Blue Note Jazz Club. Kelela’s 12-song set is a little over an hour long with tracks from across her discography, from the 2013 fan-fave mixtape Cut 4 Me through to her most recent studio album, Raven. It’s a harp-assisted sojourn through the soundscapes that have made the singer-songwriter an inescapable part of electronic dance music’s very queer, future-facing gaze.
In Nikki Giovanni’s “Kidnap Poem,” the late author wrote “ever been kidnapped/by a poet/if i were a poet/i’d kidnap you/put you in my phrases and meter/you to jones beach/or maybe coney island.” This fervent longing to escape into, alongside, and perhaps away from love echoes in Kelela’s opener, “Enemy” a track that calls out and then forgives a disappointing partner, before she transitions into the sermon-like “Raven,” a solemn post-mortem of a relationship that only became lighter after it was released. Both of these works hold love’s sharpest points within their phrases, evoking the people we’ve taken to our favorite places during the lush days of a new romance, and the times long after, when that love became a lesson on renewal. These are hymns for people who prefer to self-soothe and tend to their hearts in solitude, evident on the gut punch that is “Take Me Apart.” Here, over a soft percussion, she is explicit in her expectations: “Don’t say you’re in love, baby/Don’t say you’re in love until you learn to take me apart,” preemptively blocking the emotional entanglements that occur when people find it easier to say love than to show up as someone who is in love. It’s a terrifying demand but also one that clarifies. The track eases into the blushing and bashful “Bankhead,” which delicately ascends with an assist from a sparkling piano and a moving choral arrangement that includes the undeniably refined voice of up-and-coming Kenyan-Ugandan singer Xenia Manasseh.
Kelela has been in the game for over a decade, and holds the distinction of being prolific even though she’s released only a handful of projects. She is a masterful re-interpreter of her own songs, unafraid to redo and redo and redo, stripping away instrumentation, adding more stacked vocals, or bringing in the acoustics of a band. On 2015’s Hallucinogen Remixes, released only a few months after her Hallucinogen EP, “All the Way Down” is remixed twice, and each one is a reinvention of the artist’s chameleonic tastes. On In the Blue Light, “All the Way Down,” remixed again, is a standout gift. Lyrics like “Is my head in the way/’cause my heart can’t explain” reverberate at the beat of a pulse, projecting a single-minded and urgent need to see where the choice to stay in a relationship can lead. Not to be the person who always brings Janet Jackson into any contemporary body of work that channels both the carnal and sensual parts of loving, but when the influence fits, it fits. Kelela’s poised seduction bears the imprints of “Anything” and “Are You Still Up” songs that transmit not only desire and longing, but patience for the right moment, the right hour.
As Kelela comfortably settles into the show, she shares that her first time at the Blue Note was to see Amel Larrieux, the vocalist from Groove Theory. She “taught me how to sing,” Kelela says. Here, she gives her songs an R&B sensibility, intuitively making her perspective both narrative and observational, delivering verified ballads for lover girls in their healing eras who grew up on Larrieux at home and gospel at Sunday Service. On tracks like “Waitin’,” “30 Years,” and “Better,” she’s a reverend leading her own testimony: “Saw you there and it fucked me up. … Damn, didn’t we have a good time?/Spinning around, we couldn’t get off our ride,” she sings on the former. “Better,” meanwhile, is the apex of closure, with insight and maturity that speaks of fresh starts and the wisdom of distance and self-reflection. To love and long for companionship makes us better beings for a while, irrespective of whether the love lasts one night or a hundred years. The constant attempts themselves are redeeming.
Kelela has always made it seem courageous to love: a choice you can only make when you’re daring and ready to be changed. It’s the ultimate act of improvisation. In Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool,” jazz is something you do in June cushioned between gin and death. Here, it’s what you do when listening to Kelela’s remix of Betty Carter’s “Love Notes,” and the closer, “Cherry Coffee.” You will nod your head, snap your fingers, and likely scrunch up your face after hearing a particularly nasty chord or an exquisite riff. The album is memory revised and remixed. Kelela has sharpened an unnerving capacity to face despair, and it makes her work unexpectedly lethal: It can land like a teardrop, or slice like the first time you see the one you used to love after a break up.
On “Blue Light,” from her 2017 debut, Take Me Apart, Kelela let herself free-fall. And in the five-year break before her next album, she kept falling, fortifying herself with books and clear-eyed intentions. Years later, in a Greenwich Village bar, she seemingly emerged from that trust exercise the strongest she’s ever been and also the most vulnerable, her music and her performance a testament to having loved and a commitment to keep doing so.
