On Saturday night, Jill Scott sang at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md. About midway up the center seating area stood a little boy. He wore a white undershirt and white basketball shorts, and he was with his mother, a petite woman in a green dress. The boy couldn’t have been more than 8—though I would guess that he was 7.

He was loving Scott. As soon as she opened her mouth, he was standing up, rocking to the beat. His finger waved above his head. His arms pounded the air. Every once in a while, he’d turn and sing a lyric to his mother, who mouthed the music back to him. Except for one time. In this instance, she gestured for him to go into the aisle and sprayed him up and down with bug repellent.

But that was the only noteworthy pause of musical bliss.

That boy was a gold-star concertgoer. He made sure every penny spent on his ticket was worth it. Come to think of it, he probably couldn’t even see Scott. There was a pack of guys standing up in front of him most of the time.

No doubt about it, this adorable little mini-fan was feeling what most others in the audience revealed with slightly less enthusiasm: Man, Jill—she’s damn good.

You get the sense that Scott treats a crowd of 40 no different than a crowd of 4,000. She laughs. She curses. She instructs. She informs: Before a series of slow jazzy love songs, she says, “This is the segment of the show I call ‘Trying to get you laid.’” Between songs, Scott says that she thinks she knows something about relationships, and she’d like to share it. In the end though, she delivers no real speeches. With emotional authority, Scott just sings her heart out, and mostly forgets about the audience mid-song, just concentrating on her sound. This was particularly true with her rendition of “Insomnia,” in which she sings about the hours passing by as she waits in bed wondering where her lover is. The woman earns her back-up singers (three, for the record). She also looked great. As the token full-figured woman, Scott was featured in Vogue’s “Shape” issue this year. But there’s no doubt, she can pick out her clothes: on Saturday, she came out in a black satiny tunic, big jewelry, black leggings, and chunky heals.

Scott saved two of her most popular, more up-tempo songs for the end of her performance. After “finishing” her set, she sauntered—and this woman really does saunter—off stage only re-emerge a few minutes later with go-go legend Chuck Brown for her hit “It’s Love” from her debut album, Who is Jill Scott? At this point, a man stepped out into the aisle for the sole purpose of shaking his butt. He stood there for a while, back bent, cheeks out, and wiggled his tush. Then, an usher directed him back to his seat.

After “It’s Love”, Scott continued onto her latest catchy tune “Hate on Me.” Chorus: “Hate on me hater, now or later….”

No one seemed to be complying.

I’ve always liked Jill Scott. Pardon the terrible, terrible music cliche, but the woman marches to the beat of her own drum. She puts her personal life, including a recent divorce, out there in her songs. She talks A LOT on stage, if her live album is any indication. She goes into these long, sort of random spoken-word pieces, and tells adults in the audience to send their kids away because this is “for grown folks.” And that was just the early years.

Sometimes, Scott gets lumped in with other neo-soul singers, like Erykah Badu. But, that’s not fair. She’s definitely not as wacky as Badu, who inspired this memorable passage in a Texas Monthly profile:

I had already learned something that morning about waiting for Badu. She had been in her home studio until five in the morning, so we had started our interview almost two hours late. Badu admits that her own conception of the temporal rarely coincides with the one used by people who wear watches. Now, holding her daughter, she talked, again in her own way, about time. “The last ten years have been like a circle,” she said, “going back to Chinese astrology. I got my record deal in 1996, which was the Year of the Pig, and my first album came out in 1997. I was born in 1971, which was also the Year of the Pig. And 2007 will be the Year of the Pig again. I know this year will be special.”

(Sorry, I read the story over a year and a half ago, and I still remembered that, and felt a strong desire to share it.)

Back to Scott. When her Who Is Jill Scott? CD came out in 2000, I borrowed it from a friend and listened to it for a long time. I’ve been less enamored with her recent cds, but I’m always interested in knowing what she’s up to. She’s coming to the Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday, and then she heads off to Africa to do more filming on The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The movie has been in the news a lot, especially when director Anthony Minghella passed away in March.

But, I’ve seen little about Scott’s “first-ever” “earthy, personal and tell-it-like-it-is” book of poetry, as the book jacket calls it.

Included in this book, I expected to see quite a few verses on overcoming loss, hope, body image, city life in Philadelphia (Jill’s hometown), and love, love, love. Scott loves love. That’s for sure.

What I did not expect to see was this small poem, as well as a few others surprises:

I pushed and
I grunted and
I labored and
I squeezed and
You splashed and
I cleaned and
I stood and
I flushed
and
I don’t even think of you now

The title: “Potty Trained”

Photo by Simba Madziva

What is there left to say about Vampire Weekend that hasn’t already been said in Spin, Rolling Stone, the New York Times and other publications? By this point, their story is familiar: the quartet went to Columbia University together. They started playing music together in early 2006, and quickly picked up plenty of heat and a record contract.

In the various things I’ve read, the band seems hyper-articulate and contemplative, and straining for an advanced level of self-awareness. Here’s a sample from lead singer Ezra Koenig: “I’d taken a trip to India the year before and stopped in London for a few days on the way there. It got me thinking a lot about colonialism and the aesthetic connections between preppy culture and native cultures of places like Africa and India.” Pardon? The band’s own bio opens with a similar line about Koenig’s musings.

But, here’s the big revelation of last night’s performance at the Rock and Roll Hotel: Vampire Weekend was pretty low-key. They played their music. They played it well. They didn’t talk much to the crowd. But, they seemed glad to be there. They were on and off in roughly an hour.

The band has talked before about the various labels given to their sound. They were called “prep rock.” But, Koenig didn’t like that. According to the Times, they prefer “Upper West Side Soweto.”

The best—maybe only—shout-out of the night was to keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij’s family, who live in the area. Ah, I thought upon hearing that, so that explains the happy group of 50 to 60-something Middle-Eastern people near the stage.

After the show, I caught up with Batmanglij’s mother, who didn’t want to talk much, and father, who cheerfully said he didn’t want to talk at all. But, eventually, I met the keyboardist’s cousin, who said Batmanglij’s family is Iranian and that “half the people here are older Persian people,” she said.

Batmanglij went to the Potomac School in McLean. She called him “an artist” and said that his family always really encouraged him to pursue music. The support obviously showed at the venue, and apparently would later on as well, since the band was staying the night with Batmanglij’s family before journeying on to Philadelphia.

A couple more pics from the show below: