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After a break, Anita Baker eases back into performing.
by Vaughn Watson, Jan. 31, 2003
The Providence Journal (Tribune News Service)
Slow dancing to Anita Baker's jams was practically a national pastime in the 1980s, when Baker's buttercream soul dominated urban radio.
Baker won back-to-back-to-back Grammys for best female R&B vocal performance from 1988 to 1990.
Her hits _ "Rhythm of Love," "Sweet Love," and "Good Love" _ rocked your world like a "quiet storm," as the late-night radio format that embraced Baker is known. (The title comes from a romantic `75 Smokey Robinson album.)
Baker's relationship ballads tackled the tougher parts of lasting love, too. She reached the hook of a song then folded it inward.
"Giving You The Best That I Got" or "I Apologize," Baker sang from the perspective of a woman who wouldn't bother sticking around if she didn't care.
After recording four albums for Elektra between 1983 and 1990, and a fifth disk four years later, Baker dropped out of the scene.
She walked away from music at the top of her game.
Eight years later, Baker is finally back, performing a few dates on a select concert list that began last November.
Where'd she go? Baker took time off to raise her sons, Walter, now 10, and Edward, 8.
"Anyone who has a couple of kids knows that's a full-time love. Between soccer practice and basketball and school plays, I've become a bit of a chauffeur," Baker said in a phone interview from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich. She was engaging and informal, chatting about the importance of raising her family and nursing her mother through a seven-year battle with Alzheimer's until her death at the end of 2001.
Baker even talked about learning to drive. ("I had a phobia (about driving) that I've overcome that I'm proud of," she says. "There are a lot of people that don't drive _ Quincy Jones. I've heard Barbara Walters doesn't drive.")
Baker, a Toledo native who turned 45 on Sunday, says she was "basically dealing with the same thing that everyone at my age group is dealing with. I found that it was impossible to do all of those things at one time and find the music."
She decided to take a break after listening to one of her own songs _ the title track to her last studio disk, 1994's "Rhythm of Love."
"It says that there are rhythms to the various stages of life. I started to understand what that was about," Baker said. "That rhythm was about family. I had to understand that or I'd keep bumping my head.
"People were suing me for breach of contact because I wouldn't work. There was a lot I had to do simply to make a decision to stay with my family," she says.
"We weathered those storms. It was really simple for me: The music comes when it comes. When it's not coming, I've learned, I can't force it."
Baker's music changed the way we knew R&B in the 1980s. She made love songs poetic. Even the album art of her sophomore disk, 1986's "Rapture," was exquisite. It featured Baker in a dark dress, her eyes closed as if in thought. She was crouched in a meditative, Alvin Ailey-style pose. The album's best song, "Caught up in the Rapture," was soaked in a smooth, romantic style.
Her phrasing, pacing, and poise reflected her influences. Baker aspires to articulate a word with the pinpoint jazz phrasing that Roberta Flack brought to R&B. She can burrow through to the essence of a song with the fiery reverence of Al Green's gospel.
Or she can move your world with good-time, rhythmic finesse, like Smokey Robinson did.
"There are stages of your life where certain things stop you cold," Baker says in the interview. "You have to deal with them one way or the other. Holding my mother in my arms as she passed on just made some things extremely clear to me.
"I want to live. I don't mean just wake up and walk through it. I want to live. Tomorrow's not promised."
She says she has a note in her car, and a note in her closet, reminding her of these things. She wants to record again _ in time. ("I know some songs came out of my mom passing on. Very uplifting things. ... There are some dark things that came out that we keep in the piano bench.")
"Normally, we'd have the record first, then eight to nine months of a death-defying tour, where I leap small buildings in a single bound," she says.
"Again, it's the idea of wanting to live, and to define my life. We decided to do some dates. I wanted to stick my toe in the water. See how it felt. See if I could even do this anymore. We thought of dates around the holidays because, you know, with the family gone, holidays are kinda difficult. I chose to sit on the couch and not have a pity party.
"We said, `Let's, see how this feels,'" she says. "Aw man, the water's fine."
___ Visit projo.com, the online service of The Providence Journal at http://www.projo.com Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. (c) 2003, The Providence Journal.