[youtube id=”EgvE6c7-2ag”]The D’Angelo documentary Devil’s Pie from Dutch director Carine Bijlsma premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Today the first trailer for the film was released revealing bits of the project that began filming in January 2015. D’Angelo gave Bijlsma the rare privilege to come inside his world and document his life and music from an up-close standpoint. The singer’s battles with addiction, his disappearance from the public eye and his re-emergence with Black Messiah in 2014 are talked about in the 85-minute film. The portrait of his life thus far is exciting for history and it is also revealed that D’Angelo is currently working on a new album. 

[youtube id=”obJuKmMjFG4″]D’Angelo re-emerges after 2014’s Black Messiah with the song “May I? Standing Unshaken-Oh Traveller Have A Seat” for the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack. The song can be heard in the video game between Paradise Mercifully Departed and Dear Uncle Tacitus missions in Chapter 5 riding to Shady Belle. The song sounds like one of Funkadelic’s tamer moments. 

[youtube id=”vCJY2NSSU1g”] Raphael Saadiq’s first solo album, Instant Vintage was released in 2002 after years of being an R&B trailblazer as a member of Tony!Toni!Toné!.Saadiq worked with D’Angelo in the ’90s as members of the Ummah collective. They had their first successful collaboration on D’Angelo’s Grammy-winning “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” taken from his Voodoo album. Saadiq’s “Be Here” and its accompanying album was seen as one of best records of the dwindling neo-soul era. Saadiq’s bassline and D’Angelo’s voice took their fans even deeper into their sound and visually engaged them with a video that was heavily played on BET. Instant Vintage and “Be Here” received Grammy nominations and lived up to the album’s title with fans who saw the two of them as the embodiment of a rare soul pedigree. Raphael Saadiq has five solo albums with Stone Rollin’ released in 2011 being his most recent one. In 2018, Saadiq received his first Oscar nomination for “Mighty River” that he wrote with Mary J. Blige and Taura Simpson for the Mudbound soundtrack. 

[youtube id=”E3UkN62x98k”] The Soulquarians were a ’90s collective that included Questlove, D’Angelo, J. Dilla, Erykah Badu, James Poyser and Common. Pitchfork put together a video to give an overview of their work and impact. Their sessions produced D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart. Q-Tip, Raphael Saadiq and DJ Premier are some of the artists who made music with them in Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios. Their time as a collective ended after a 2000 story in Vibe magazine offended some artists by suggesting that they were under Questlove’s rule.