Sunday nights at Northerly Island are usually thinner than Saturdays, and this one was not — by the time the house lights went the field was packed tight enough that the phones going up read as a single sheet of white light rather than individual screens. Kehlani opened a world tour here on August 9th, which means Chicago got the version with the nerves still in it.

She has spent ten years being described as an R&B singer by people who have not listened past the first record. She sings like someone who learned to do it in a room with no microphone.

The staging put THE PHOENIX across the LED wall in capitals and worked in pink, purple and blue almost exclusively, which on a stage this wide risks looking like a lighting preset and instead held together because the colour changed with the song rather than with the beat.

The Backstage Guest

Janet Jackson was there, under pink light in a hooded sweatshirt, filmed backstage by a crew that captioned it queens supporting queens. That is the kind of detail that would be trivia at a bigger show and is not trivia at a tour opener: the person whose stagecraft this entire genre of performance descends from, turning up on night one, in Chicago.

Gabe Phoenix, a Los Angeles photographer, shot the night and put seventeen frames out the same evening, which is how the tour-opening images that defined the run came out of this city rather than a later stop.

What She Sang

"Out The Window" was the vocal showcase and she took it slower live than on record, which exposed more of the bottom of her range than the production usually allows. The crowd handled the quiet parts, which a lakefront shed does not guarantee — open air plus thirty thousand capacity usually means the between-notes moments get talked over.

The Northerly Island canopy covers maybe a third of the audience and the rest are on grass with the skyline directly behind the stage, which gives this venue the best sightline in Chicago and the worst low-end retention. For a show built on bass and breath, the lake takes something out of it before it reaches the back.

Janet Jackson watched the first night of it from the wings. Chicago got the tour before anybody else did.

Cover image: Northerly Island / Wikimedia Commons