D’Angelo’s long-awaited third album Black Messiah was so rapturously received that it made its way to #1 in The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll despite being released just 11 days before the voting deadline (not to mention its #4 finish in our readers’ poll, the Gummys). Now he’s booked his first concert since the album came out, and fittingly, it’s on 2/7 at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. The Apollo is a historic venue for black music, and D’Angelo has a long personal history with it; as The Wall Street Journal notes, D performed there in 1991 as part of an amateur talent competition and ended up winning three nights in a row, using the prize money to buy the equipment he used to start recording 1995 debut Brown Sugar. The Apollo gig is D’Angelo’s only US date right now, but he begins a European tour four days later in Zurich. Tickets for the Apollo go on sale at 10AM EST on 1/21, with a presale on 1/19-20 for Apollo A-List members.

[Photo by Vallery Jean/FilmMagic.]