Deep Dive: Listening to D’Angelo

The next event in the series Deep Dive, which invites audiences to listen — really listen — to artists who have shaped our musical imagination, focuses on D’Angelo, the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who died in 2025 at the age of 51. Known for synthesizing a wide variety of Black American musical styles, including R&B, soul, gospel, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, D’Angelo released three albums that altered the musical landscape and remain widely influential: Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014). To help understand his contributions, we welcome a musician, to be announced, and scholar Daphne A. Brooks to guide the audience through selected tracks, taking a deep dive into the artist’s sound, style, and significance. Brooks is a professor of Black studies, American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality Studies, and music at Yale University; she is the author of, most recently, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound.

Presented with H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music.

Made possible with support from the Elebash Global Voices Fund.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher GC Public Programs