Review: Jazmine Sullivan brings ‘Heaux Tales’ home to the Met Philly

Don’t blame Jazmine Sullivan if her voice was not always presented to optimal effect at the Met Philadelphia on Friday night.

Even for a singer of such prodigious gifts, it can be hard to always be heard clearly in a room in which 3,400 people are singing along with every word.

Last year, Sullivan — who grew up in Strawberry Mansion, a short way up Ridge Avenue from the Met — released Heaux Tales, her first collection of new songs in six years.

In some ways, Heaux Tales — whose title Frenchifies ‘ho’ to subvert the word’s pejorative connotations — is modest in scope. It contains only eight songs, clocking in at 32 minutes. Upon release, it was referred to as a “project” or an EP, rather than an album.

But Heaux Tales has had an outsized impact on the 33-year-old Sullivan’s career and audience. It’s an artwork that creates community, with interludes between songs that actually add substance as real-life women discuss self-doubt and sexual agency while wondering what men are good for. In many cases the inevitable conclusion is: not much.

To say that the approach resonated would be an understatement. Heaux Tales was named 2021 album of the year by BET, NPR and Pitchfork as well as earning a spot on The Inquirer’s Top Ten list.

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Last month, it spawned an expanded edition called Heaux Tales, ‘Mo Tales. And on April 3, it’s up for Grammys for best R&B album as well as R&B song and performance for the hit “Pick Up Your Feelings.” And to be frank, Sullivan nabbing only three nods and being shut out in major categories amounts to another example of Grammy cluelessness.

Sullivan hasn’t had an opportunity to tour behind Heaux Tales until now due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and her homecoming show at the Met was put in peril when she tested positive for the virus last month and had to postpone eight shows.

So the anticipation was keen on Friday for her long-awaited return to North Philly, which featured Jamaican-British singer Tiana Major9 warming up the crowd — made up of approximately 70% Black women, dressed to the nines — whose engaging set peaked with “Collide,” a hit from the Queen & Slim soundtrack.

Sullivan hit the stage at 9 p.m. sharp, backed by a four-piece band and three backup singers. She began her efficient, briskly paced 80-minute set with “Bodies (Intro),” the Heaux Tales opener that features a narrator waking up with a man she doesn’t recognize and telling herself in no uncertain terms that it’s time to “get it together.”

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That song was greeted enthusiastically, but the room really went wild when Sullivan, who moved about the stage in a silver bodysuit and matching overcoat, followed it with “Bust Your Windows,” the breakout song from her 2008 debut album Fearless.

As she vowed revenge on a faithless lover by doing damage to his prized automobile — years before Beyoncé did the same with a baseball bat on the visual album to her 2016 Lemonade — it was difficult to get a clean look at Sullivan on stage, for all the phones held in the air, with empathetic fans either recording the performance, or themselves singing along to it.

Sullivan sang all eight songs from Heaux Tales, plus two from it’s deluxe version — “Insecure” (which featured a prerecorded spoken intro from Issa Rae, the creator of the HBO show of the same name), and the delightfully lewd “BPW.”

That song, like many others Sullivan sang on Friday, portrayed relations between men and women as a power struggle which women are equipped to win. On “On It,” she told a paramour she was ready to do what both of them wanted, but he needed to answer a question first: “Tell me why you deserve it?”

Sullivan is a virtuoso vocalist. Save for a not-all-that-large video screen behind her, the show employed no needless visual aids. Sullivan’s voice is her special effect. It swoops and soars and purrs and roars, and she sang superbly throughout the evening, though the sound mix was sometimes frayed, and the raucous atmosphere in the room wasn’t ideal for appreciating the subtleties of her performance.

Early on, she shouted out “Philly, my home. For supporting me; for raising me.” She quieted the show down, sitting on a stool at center stage, accompanied only by guitar on Fearless’ “In Love With Another Man,” saying “I wrote this song when I was baby.”

That song, and the similarly unadorned and sorrowful “Lost Ones,” from Heaux Tales, were the vocal highlights of the night, each ending in wordless codas that dazzled with their dexterity and expression of deep feeling. After those relatively muted interludes, the energy came back, with “Let It Burn,” from 2015′s Reality Show and “Need U Bad,” reaching back again to her 2008 debut.

And then it went out with a bang with “Pick Up Your Feelings,” the Heaux Tales hit that boiled down the album’s essence into a rhyming couplet that the women in the audience shouted out in unison: “I deserve so much more than you gave me, so now I’m savin’ me.”