Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary.

A key influence on neo-soul was the hip-hop producer J Dilla, whose gift to music was to approach musical time in a new way: to remove notes, to make patterns repeat over much longer stretches than pop music would normally allow – over 32 bars rather than four – with the result that, to ears attuned to greater regularity, it sounded somehow wrong, as well as right.