Seated amid a bank of keyboards, Stevie Wonder addresses the audience at the first date of his tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, his most celebrated album. He says playing it in full like this was a longstanding ambition: the issue was that it needed so many people to bring it to fruition. He actually fulfilled that ambition a decade ago in North American arenas in 2014 and 2015, gigs from which the 50th anniversary shows take their cue – complete with Superstition added as an encore – but that said, you have to take his point about the number of people involved.
There really are a lot of musicians up there: three percussionists, a string section, five brass players, six backing vocalists, two guitarists, three keyboard players, including Wonder himself, who variously plays a bank of synthesisers both vintage and modern, a grand piano, an upright tack piano and, on Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing, a bizarre stringed instrument called a harpejji that wasn’t actually invented when Stevie Wonder last released an album, let alone when Songs in the Key of Life was made. Harpejii or not, that very much counts as scaling things down dramatically compared to the album’s actual sessions. Made by a man who could pretty much do everything himself, its recording nevertheless involved 108 musicians: eight people are credited for handclaps.
Its lavishness spoke volumes both about the commercial expectations placed upon it, and the artistic challenge involved in capping what Wonder had recently achieved. Having threatened to retire from music entirely prior to its making, Wonder reconsidered and wound up signing what was, in 1975, the biggest recording contract in history, worth around $230m in today’s money. And in the space of barely two years, he’d released Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, a bravura display of talent so overwhelming that, when Paul Simon won the 1976 best album Grammy, his acceptance speech thanked Wonder for not releasing anything in the preceding year and thus giving everyone else a chance.
The remarkable thing about the Songs in the Key of Life live show is not that it reminds you how extraordinary the ensuing album was, and is – given that everyone from Michael Jackson to Elton John to George Michael has called it the greatest album ever made, it hardly needs highlighting – but that it embellishes it. Not because of the expanded arrangements, lovely though they are: it’s a moot point as to whether Village Ghetto Land is much improved when played by live strings rather than Wonder’s stacked synthesisers, as the studio version was pretty incredible to start off with. It’s because it is resolutely a live performance, rather than a perfect recreation.
Wonder fluffs his harmonica solo on Easy Goin’ Evening (My Mama’s Call) and insists the band restart Isn’t She Lovely, dissatisfied with the initial version (“Stop!” he cries. He also stretches songs out at will, the band locking into the tough funk of All Day Sucker and Black Man, and adds to the album’s already teeming tracklisting. Its first half now comes with another instrumental as well as the knotty, jazz-fusion influenced Contusion.
You could, at a push, call it a jam, replete with call-and-response audience participation, but that feels like underselling its dramatic, symphonic soul. For all its peerless reputation, there’s a certain risk involved in performing Songs in the Key of Life live, more or less in order (and including the four songs from the A Something’s Extra EP that was bundled with the original album). Risky because the album opens in relatively understated style: Love’s In Need of Love Today, Have a Talk With God and Village Ghetto Land are incredible songs by any metric, but they’re downbeat, sombre, frequently desperate in tone, reflective of someone so disheartened by mid-70s America he was strongly considering relocating to Ghana and devoting himself to charity work, hardly the big razzle-dazzling opening you might expect from an arena show.
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