Art Madison - Let It Flow (2022)

Art Madison is the best soul singer from the 1990s that virtually no one has heard of. His great strength, and his fatal weakness, I assume, is that there was no one he wanted to sound like more than the incomparable Marvin Gaye, who died in 1984, just about a decade before Madison's sensational tribute to him, In the A.M. In pitch, delivery, hooks, instrumentation, theme--sex, the city, poverty, hope--his success in embodying What's Going On and Let's Get It On is uncanny.. To this day, when I make a playlist I always include tracks from In the A.M. along with those from Gaye. But is embodying a thing the same as making it one's own? I never understood why Madison's album didn't establish him as a young star to watch or why when it didn't and he seemed to disappear, there was no tracking him down to see what he was up to--or to bring him into the recording studio to learn whether he'd found a way to master the soul-pop tradition that it had taken Gaye years to make his own. I've searched online and off and still don't know whether Madison is alive or dead, singing gospel in some choir perhaps or put the mic down and went on to fame, fortune and family in a less heralded manner. In the A.M. came out in 1993. I've never stopped wondering what might have been or how the man--as well as the singer--is doing. If it still matters to him, he had one listener who was touched by his music and who hasn't forgotten him. © Ronald Walcott