Abandon.
That’s the most apt word I can think of when considering Stevie Wonder’s sudden, pre-election Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart tour showcase at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. It was meant to create a sense of harmony and peace among unsettled voters in (mostly) swing states across America, but Wonder, instead, used this moment to remind audiences of his boisterous, impactful and soulfully original catalog of song, and how vivacious and free he has always been (perhaps, now more than in the past) as a vocalist and harmonica player.
With that, Wonder and his rapturous cast of mighty musicians and background singers—what seemed like 30-people strong, including a horn section, percussionists and string players—made a muscular, propellent sound that focused its attention on Little Stevie’s past in the City of Brotherly Love. That meant recalling his teendom’s first times playing in Philly at the Uptown Theater, riffing wordlessly on the Stylistics’ “Betcha By Golly, Wow” and taking on two of Philadelphia International Records’ signature hits: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” and “Love Train” (by McFadden & Whitehead and the O’Jays, respectively).
For all of his dedication to that which was Philadelphia strong and sonically bold, what made Wonder’s two-and-a-half-hour live set one of the best shows (if not the best show) of 2024 is how free and without limits or agenda he was. Sure, from the outset, Wonder was about hating war, loathing injustice and balming our restless souls with his first song, his newest rubbery ballad, “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart.”
From there, however, Wonder’s set was an adventure—pure abandon—as he thanked God “for the opportunities to play, sing and write” and to “use all of that for good.” And to take that good and make it funky, precious, precocious and wild.
Moving from the complex, Steely Dan-like brass of “Broken Heart,” the cool Latin-laced blues of “As If You Read My Mind” and a better-than-it-should-have-been, buoyantly congested “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” an exuberant Wonder and his crew lifted “Higher Ground” into the heavens starting from the ground up. I don’t know who his current drummer or bassist are, but they knocked the bottom out of Wonder’s groove and kept the rhythm rumbling.
After asking the crowd to guess the notes (a game he playfully teased throughout the night) and then singing “You Are My Sunshine,” Wonder carried that shine forward with “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” and “For Once In My Life” and began his journey into impossibly winding key changes and angular scatting that never truly left the structural synchronicity of his songs.
Still playing with the audience “(You gotta heeeet this note, you gotta heeet eeet hawd”), the rhythmic interplay of “I Was Made To Love Her” was only bettered by the improbable, chromatic vocal leaps that he applied, highly, to the chipper “My Cherie Amour” and the melancholy “Overjoyed.” Later in the program, an ever-ascending “Ribbon In The Sky” would attract the same high, weightless vocal performance from Wonder. Whether jumble-mumbling to his audience in uplifted song or kidding around with the crowd as a chance to game, Stevie Wonder—at the age of 74—sounded as if he was having the most fun of his life, acting puckish and prankish. So great.
After a brief solo interlude from his friend/protégée, singer Sheléa, and the big band’s fluid instrumental take on the bracingly cinematic “Contusion,” Wonder returned to the stage and turned “Village Ghetto Land” into a winged, stringed opera, a low, blowing “Living For The City” into a rapid, fired-up, fast R&B anthem beyond its usual symmetry (so too were “Sir Duke” and “Isn’t She Lovely” speedy and soulful) and “Superstition” into a happily sloppy, funked-up mess.
By the time that Wonder and Co. wound up the evening with the hyperactive “Do I Do” and the showy jazz of “Another Star,” the night was devoid of politics and social consciousness and filled only with love for a catalog that stands and dances unparalleled and was performed in a manner most unique, vivid and impactful.
And with delicious abandon.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Wes Orshoski (taken two days earlier at Madison Square Garden)
