JEWELS 'N' JAZZ
SADE Diamond Life (Portrait) JOHN MARTYN Sapphire (Island) Sade (pronounced Shar-DAY) is the stage name of 25-year-old Nigerian-born London-bred Helen Folasade Adu and right now she’s very hot in the U.K., which is sometimes a prologue to U.S. success and sometimes not.
JEWELS 'N' JAZZ
SADE Diamond Life (Portrait) JOHN MARTYN Sapphire (Island)
Richard C. Walls
Sade (pronounced Shar-DAY) is the stage name of 25-year-old Nigerian-born London-bred Helen
Folasade Adu and right now she’s very hot in the U.K., which is sometimes a prologue to U.S. success and sometimes not. The right person in the right place, different in a superficial way but fitting in with current pop-dancefashion trends—these aspects of her appeal probably won’t travel well. To these ears she sounds like a candidate for VH-1, the new excessively gentle cable station for aging pop/rock fans, being a slick, sometimes pleasant, easy listening singer of love songs. Sade projects a stunningly exotic image but her voice, breathy but generally devoid of much inflection, is ordinary. A recent article in USA Today conjured Nina Simone and Mae West to describe
this new pop phenom, but I think Sheila E. might be more to the point. Her band, three Brits who pose well for the album cover, make competent anonymous dance music with (and this may account for the advance word about Sade being “jazzy”) an occasional, mechanical sax lick thrown in.