Another woman called Moses
Keep your thin-voiced hotties and reinvented rockers – fire-starter and hot mama Chaka Khan still inspires uplift and earthy passion.

By Kandia Crazy Horse

GENGHIS. KHUBILAI . Aga. Nusrat. Ricardo Montalban's wrathful cosmic tyrant. What a lineage precedes the former Yvette Marie Stevens of Chi-Town, who renamed herself after a Stan Getz tune. Rechristened drumside amid late-1960s Afro-romanticism, the master singer known as Chaka Khan ("Chaka" = "woman of fire" in an African dialect) has enjoyed a very storied career, alternating between Afro-hippie rock chick (in Rufus) and jazz swingin' glam-ma, her bluesy sojourn through the gutter of excess fit to invoke Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem, "Kubla Khan," penned circa 1797:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

... A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Consult the 2003 Essence magazine cover story on the vocalist (who appeared with hard-luck heiress-musician Angie Stone) for more prurient details about the ways her offstage struggles have mirrored the message of Coleridge's lines.

What most of us can truly measure is the work. And live, Khan has piloted folks, especially the race, to the sonic promised land like a gutbucket-glam Harriet Tubman. The proof persists in the palpable thrills of brothermen of my father's general age (b. 1941), who, even in their sunset years, drool at the mere hint of Khan, who was anointed by them as the premier sex symbol of the 1970s. The mighty thunder of that pint-size red hot mama eternally wailing for her myriad demon-lovers in forms overt or oblique is universal and undeniable even during her worst public moments – like her screeching turn at this year's MTV Awards, serving as respected/resented rent-a-soul for Kanye West, who's famously ridden Khan's quiet-storm chestnut "Through the Fire" to the bank. That fiery, multioctave voice is one of the inexorable verities of late-modern black experience. Khan is one of postsoul culture's Olympian midwives, a diaspora icon fit for the Holy Order of Mama Afrika.

She's every woman

As exogamous audiences, cultural critics chief among them, have learned, knock La Khan only at your peril. Silence those snarky Gen X critiques of the "I Feel for You" video and its quaint early-'80s production values, or you'll get Shabba-Doo'd upside yo' head! To my generation of soul babies, Khan is the sepia Stevie Nicks; indeed, any sistagurl anywhere over the age of 25 will instantly switch into neck-swivelin', finger-snappin', vainglorious freak-a-leek when "I'm Every Woman" blares from a stereo or radio.

One has only to consult the liner notes of a random sampling of "neo-soul" releases to dig Khan's influence: Erykah Badu's semisuccessful cover of "Stay," Queen of Hip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige's underwhelming take on "Sweet Thing" (which Khan later referred to in concert as "the song Mary J. Blige fucked up"), etc. Televised black award shows featuring Khan in fine fettle have cut to Mary J. in the audience, seemingly on the verge of tears or meltdown – then again, at the time of her arrival in 1992, Blige was heralded as the "new Chaka Khan," a potential kiss of death for any young aspirant in the siren's temple of song.

And then there are all the black filmmakers who feel they must include a Rufus tune – often the Stevie Wonder-penned hit "Tell Me Something Good" – on their soundtrack, or at least the trailer, for authenticity. Badu, who counts Khan as her all-time favorite artist, also ran through "Hollywood" for Spike Lee's underrated and misperceived Bamboozled. Yet few of these 21st-century fly foxes can rival Khan's full contralto. Nor can they exude such free sensuality.

The jazz singer

The world first embraced Khan upon the release of "Tell Me Something Good," and Rufus were (inevitably) labeled a funk band in the process. That smash broke into both the pop and R&B charts in 1974, but most of Rufus's later hits – "Ain't Nobody," "Masterjam," "Sweet Thing," "Do You Love What You Feel?," and "Everlasting Love" – primarily charted in the R&B realm. Yet the travesty is that, as with several other postwar musicians of both pop and cultic prominence, Khan's talent was more complex and richer than that restricting market niche. I distinctly recall an early-1980s PBS program wherein Khan was being interviewed and she sort of coyly stated, "I wanna be a jazz singer when I grow up," or something to that effect. This suggested to me that despite all the singer had accomplished throughout the 1970s – especially the 1978, Arif Mardin-produced, solo release Chaka (Warner Bros.) so enshrined in my household – the sense that she had not made manifest her vision of self as an artist lingered. Beyond the great early-'90s, Mardin-arranged version of "A Night in Tunisia," Khan appears to have finally approximated her vision with last autumn's ClassiKhan (Sanctuary). The punning title may have been among the strikes counted against the release, judging by a plethora of ambivalent reviews, but these critics have done the disc a disservice. Khan's assured and refreshing – several times unconventional (see the subtle reading of the ho eulogy "Hey Big Spender") – revival of such 20th-century standards as collected on ClassiKhan places her at the vanguard of the current lucrative trend of Boomer rockers and junior pop stars reinventing their careers by raiding the American Songbook with her friend and fellow rock-into-jazz player Joni Mitchell, who mostly triumphed with her orchestral reimagining of her back pages, Both Sides Now (Reprise, 2000). Sure, one can make an argument for the relative grace of '80s punkette Cyndi Lauper's At Last (Daylight/Epic, 2003), but former Faces lead singer Rod Stewart, onetime snarling punk fellow traveler Elvis Costello, and Sinatra revenant Michael Bublé have a lot to answer for. Khan trumps them all by infusing grit, persistent girl-woman charm, and her heady sensuality into a random string of yesteryear perennials. The production's streamlining of the accompanying London Symphony Orchestra and tendency to eschew novel arrangements does not defeat Our Chaka: "Goldfinger," "Diamonds Are Forever," and, best of all, "To Sir with Love," testify to that.

However, Rufus's eponymous 1973 MCA debut, despite its flaws and period specificity, remains the most interesting album of Khan's catalog. Schizophrenic in its attempt to cater to both a (presumably white) rock audience and soul/R&B fans, it also provides a case study in the ways the neo-soul genre has failed. This failure is not entirely down to the music, as double-consciousness is the lot of black folk in the West and many neo-soul albums from the '90s onward also attempt to serve traditions that are in theory at cross-purposes. Audiences today seem just as resistant to a certain kind of fluid "biracial" fusion as they were back in the day when something, perhaps inchoate, influenced Rufus to increasingly skew their sound toward R&B radio. Khan, in her time a friend of iconoclastic hybrid artists Miles Davis and Prince, must be frustrated by this aesthetic vise. The singer – whose first acquired album was by Led Zeppelin, who was raised in a multiracial environment, and who was turned on to acid in her adolescence by her father – is still legendary for straightforward funk tunes, not such compositions like the buoyant Rufus opener "Slip 'N Slide," which is reminiscent of Leon Russell and the Shelter People's piano boogie, and the closing Stephen Stills medley "Love the One You're With"/"Sit Yourself Down," on which her signature wail takes exquisite flight. And it's a pity, for not only would Khan's progress as a unrestrained rock frontwoman have paved the way for others, but also the group produced an initial groove that, for Bay Area veterans, would invoke the late Sylvester's brilliant (if not widely celebrated) Hot Band.

As it stands now, even the soul-diva legacy that Khan does embody is threatened on diverse fronts, between the homogenization of mainstream radio, many labels' inability to develop artists properly, and hip-hop's near-evisceration of the urban aesthetic yielding a host of thin-voiced girls with little talent or sense of purpose. The fate of rising stone-soul starlets, striving to get their inner Chaka on, may be bleak or triumphant. Until that plays itself out, Khan's grace – affirmed by the many celebrants of her Standing in the Shadows of Motown performances, and this critic witnessing the singer live at Atlanta's fabulous Fox a few years back, with even former mayor Bill Campbell, who was in my row, bedazzled, reveling in the fire-spitter's glory – abides. Marvin Gaye once said, "What a person is, he brings with him when he comes to music." Well, Chaka Khan certainly has brought a wild-child persona and powerhouse vocals that can render crowds ecstatic, but, beyond her pleasure-dome, she also provides uplift, earthy passion, enlightenment, and a dynamic link between the fabled eras of black music tradition.

Chaka Khan performs with the San Francisco Symphony Fri/29, 8 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall, SF. $20-$85. (415) 864-6000. She also appears Aug. 21, 7:30 p.m., Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce, Saratoga. $35-$55. (415) 371-5500, (415) 421-TIXS.