Tuesday night at Knockdown Center in Queens, nearly 2,000 people were handed something fragile and entrusted — implicitly implored — not to break it.
For the last decade, the British electronic music producer and singer Jai Paul has functioned more as a memory than as an active musician. He released a pair of startling singles in the early 2010s — “BTSTU (Edit)” and “Jasmine (Demo),” understatedly confident and fractured soul songs that are among the most accomplished of that decade — before a set of his unfinished recordings leaked online in 2013, an event so destabilizing that it essentially sent the already reluctant musician into full retreat.
Since then, apart from the formal release of those demo recordings in 2019, he has stayed mostly quiet until this year. His show on Tuesday was his first true headlining concert, following performances at the two weekends of Coachella earlier this month.
Which is to say, this was a precious, anticipated, frankly anxious affair — the materialization of a beloved and mercurial performer moving from the chimerical to the literal. Sort of.
As he did at Coachella, Paul brought a rather unnatural performance of extremely natural songs. His appearance was a trigger of remembrance, an exhale of long-held breath. And sometimes during this set that lasted just under an hour, he was a singer of sweetness, sass and power.
Mostly, though, he and almost everyone else in the room — a warm crowd, if not a wild one — were ecstatic simply to be there, making for an event more convocation than concert, a gathering of the faithful and the patient. (Merch sold out before the show began, naturally.)
Paul is already a nostalgia act, not simply in regards to the age of his music, which feels around a dozen online micromovements old and deeply emblematic of its time, but also for an era in which the simple act of online mystery felt both novel and provocative. For a decade now, his fervent following has essentially been leaderless, a testament to the power of his music, and also the power of belief.
And so the opening stretch of the show felt a little like a test. Audience members craning their necks to see what their hero looked like (shy, in sunglasses) were met with a series of Paul’s subtler songs — “Crush,” a light funk jam; “All Night,” a soothingly aquatic soul song. His voice was firm, doling out dabs of sweetness cut with the occasional thrilling yelp. Some of Paul’s songs don’t ask much of his vocals, leaning on them mainly for texture. His sturdy, viscous band anchored the room: Paul’s brother A.K. Paul on guitar, the drummer Isaac Kizito, the bass player Rocco Palladino and the keyboardist Fabiana Palladino (both are children of the revered bass player Pino Palladino).
It was beginning to feel like another stutter-step in a career that has been nudged forward by means of tiny intrusions — a single interview, given in 2011; a very cleverly designed website; a photo in a British real estate publication; a cameo in Season 3 of “Atlanta.”
The announcement, in January, that Paul would appear at Coachella was, in some circles, as much of a stunner as news that the increasingly reclusive Frank Ocean would perform. Since the formal release of the demos in 2019, under the title “Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones),” Paul has released two more songs. (He performed another one in Queens, “So Long,” among the least distinguished of the night.)
That scarcity has created an almost unnavigable reverence, making Paul a folk hero for those in thrall to an older and less addled (but not much more sensible) idea of internet fandom. On the one hand, those who have persevered for a decade verge on worshipful. On the other hand, when you’ve set no expectations, you have no bar to fall below.
That he stood here at all felt, primarily, like a triumph over the fickleness of trend. Onstage, Paul was tentative — the same performance from a more established act might be derided. And even though Paul’s music is deliberately submerged-sounding, it was unfortunate to have his proper non-festival live debut at a venue with chronically muddy sound. (Wednesday night’s show at Brooklyn Steel will likely sound far crisper.)
Nevertheless, even the most awkward moments were received like manna, but it was only around halfway through that anyone started having real fun, either onstage or off. “Zion Wolf Theme” was a frisky dub number about anxiety, and the first moment of the night that felt genuinely ecstatic and optimistic. Then came the Minneapolis funk-esque “Good Time” and “Genevieve,” rich with sugary harmonies and moving at the speed of bliss. Paul himself appeared relieved, looser, moving a few liberated steps away from the microphone stand.
The one-two punch of “Jasmine” and “BTSTU” was corporeal and cleansing. “Jasmine” remains a stone-cold soul classic, with coy vocals and a bass line that’s sensual and unctuous. It was the night’s high point, even if its closing moments petered out into something a little too misty.
When the opening woos and coos of “BTSTU” kicked in, it was hard not to instinctually anticipate the opening lines of Drake’s “Dreams Money Can Buy,” which is built upon a sample of this song. But when Paul sang “I know I’ve been gone a long time/But I’m back and I want what is mine” — words he wrote in 2010, when the song’s first demo was discovered on MySpace, or maybe even earlier — it was a refreshing moment of defiance, an assertion of presence from a performer who seemed unsure of how heavy a footprint to leave.
The night’s closer, “Str8 Outta Mumbai,” is one of Paul’s most ornate and energetic songs, a rocket ship launch of exuberance and payoff for years of anticipation. The joy it triggered was so dizzying that it was hard to believe it was the conclusion. It was a neat trick from someone ambivalent about the spotlight — leave the audience on a floating high, and sneakily retreat back to the realm of imagination.
