A Singer in No Rush, Deploying Her Big Gestures Carefully

UNIONDALE, N.Y. — Sade Adu emerged from below the Nassau Coliseum stage here on Tuesday night immaculate: her all-black outfit tight and modest, her heels perilously high, her hair pulled back hard. Ms. Adu is 52, and in almost three decades of leading her band, Sade, she has barely aged and has never once appeared hurried. Stasis is her art.

For almost two hours during this show, part of Sade’s first American tour in a decade, Ms. Adu led a master class in minimal exertion, a study in how to wring huge effect out of the smallest suggestions.

Sade is, notionally, a soul band, though really it’s a genre unto itself. Its songs are smoke thick and oozy, and while Ms. Adu never appears to be working very hard, her voice is lustrous, spreading out smoothly over the band’s trancelike R&B and stoic rock.

Sade’s three 1980s albums — “Diamond Life,” “Promise” and “Stronger Than Pride” — remain essential, though in the rearview they appear profoundly unfashionable. Sade’s success paved the way, directly or indirectly, for all sorts of maligned genres, from smooth jazz and adult-contemporary soul to the more toothless side of trip-hop.

What separates Sade from its heirs is of course Ms. Adu, who during this show was calm and ethereal in taming a sold-out crowd of loyalists. She wasn’t always singing at full power. But when she chose to unleash the full width of her voice, the result was overwhelming. “Jezebel,” a morbid song about a prostitute, was gut wrenching, as was “Pearls,” about African poverty. And the conclusion to the love plea “Is It a Crime” was a tour de force of careful deployment, with Ms. Adu hitting the final notes with wrecking-ball power after spending much of the song letting her band mates take the fore.

That dynamic, though, revealed one of Sade’s only weaknesses. Ms. Adu was such a deliberately mild presence that almost any outsize gesture ran the risk of overshadowing her. Often it was Stuart Matthewman, on saxophone and guitar, who grabbed the spotlight, almost stealing the show for himself. His saxophone is as important to the music of Sade as Clarence Clemons’s was to the E Street Band. His solos here — on “Smooth Operator,” “Your Love Is King” and more — were precise and taut and powerful, as if he were showing them off for a tutorial. Ms. Adu received the biggest cheers, but Mr. Matthewman’s high points had a cathartic force the rest of the show lacked.

Like the other band members Mr. Matthewman isn’t ornate in any way, calling attention to himself through terse proficiency. The same was true of the thunderous drumming by Pete Lewinson and Karl Vanden Bossche on “The Sweetest Taboo,” and the slinky keys of Andrew Hale on “No Ordinary Love.” On these songs, some of Sade’s best known, Ms. Adu was all caress, never nudging where she could instead nuzzle.

Last year Sade released “Soldier of Love” (Epic), its first album in a decade, which sounded like a faded copy of the band’s crucial work. At this performance songs from the new album like “Bring Me Home” and “The Moon and the Sky” were invariably the weakest, their calm and simplicity unearned.

Sade only sometimes took advantage of the size of the room to scale up its sound; mostly it tried to bring the space down to size, to treat the arena like a small club. Ms. Adu grew more comfortable as the night progressed, trading in her heels for flats, and, later, no shoes at all. And the night ended with the slowest, most sensual, least disruptive confetti drop of all time.