D’Angelo, the visionary singer and musician who blended R&B and soul in landmark albums such as Brown Sugar and Voodoo, mesmerising critics and audiences even as he disappeared from public view for years at a time, died on October 14. He was 51. His family announced the death in a statement, saying he had “a prolonged and courageous battle with cancer”. They did not say where he died. Beginning with his debut album, 1995’s Brown Sugar, D’Angelo helped pave the way for a new era in R&B, nodding to an old-school soul sound while incorporating notes of funk, hip-hop and jazz. Alongside musicians such as Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Maxwell and Jill Scott, he became a defining artist of neo-soul, a genre that was named by his own manager, Kedar Massenburg. Despite releasing only three studio albums, D’Angelo was hailed as one of the greatest R&B singers and musical talents of his generation. A versatile musician who could toggle between guitar, drums and keyboards, he sang in a sultry, breathy style that could burst into euphoric heights. He drew early comparisons to Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and Prince, who also displayed a musical obsessiveness and played multiple instruments on his albums. “D’Angelo bears no resemblance to the dozens of sound-alike crooners who populate ‘Quiet Storm’ radio formats; his falsetto yelps, note-bending purrs and stop-and-go phrasing mark him as a one-of-a-kind singer,” Washington Post music critic Geoffrey Himes wrote in 1995. With the success of Brown Sugar, other musicians came into the singer’s fold. The drummer and producer Questlove, who became a collaborator, told Vice in 2014 that before hearing D’Angelo, “I had lost faith in modern R&B”. “Not since Prince had any black singer floored me musically the way D’Angelo did,” he added. “There were plenty of great singers, but their music was mundane. From his keyboard patches to his sloppy, human-like drum programming, I felt like I had a kindred spirit.” D’Angelo spent years working on his sophomore album, 2000’s Voodoo, an eclectic record that was influenced by the birth of his first child; the sounds of gospel, Latin, blues and hip-hop; and bootlegs of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. The album was born out of thousands of hours of musical experimentation at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where the singer collaborated with a free-flowing collective – the Soulquarians – that included Questlove, Badu, Q-Tip and J Dilla. D’Angelo was born Michael Eugene Archer in Richmond, Virginia, in 1974. Photo / Getty Images “It is an album of loose, long, dirty grooves, finger snaps, falsetto serenades, gruff mumbles and bottom-dwelling bass,” the music journalist Toure wrote in Rolling Stone. “It is soul music for the age of hip-hop.” Voodoo topped the Billboard album chart and earned D’Angelo two Grammy Awards. It also turned the singer into a reluctant sex symbol: the music video for one of the record’s standout tracks, the sultry“Untitled (How Does It Feel), featured a shirtless, muscular D’Angelo singing into the camera, and was heavily featured on MTV. “Sometimes, you know, I feel uncomfortable,” he told Toure in 2000. “To be onstage and tryin’ to do your music and people goin’, ‘Take it off! Take it off!’ Cause I’m not no stripper. I’m up there doin’ somethin’ I strongly believe in.” After the album’s release, D’Angelo receded from public view for more than a decade. He was arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession, as well as for disorderly conduct, and later spoke candidly about his struggles with addiction and rehabilitation stints. A mug shot during that time became tabloid fodder for his stark physical transformation from his “Untitled” days. But he found his way back to music. After years of silence, racial justice protests and high-profile killings of black men by police pushed him to release Black Messiah in 2014. The album featured some of his most politically explicit material – “All we wanted...