Review: R&B star Jazmine Sullivan delivers empowering frankness at Fillmore Minneapolis

R&B star Jazmine Sullivan is the queen of frankness. Her songs are the kind of intimate conversations a woman has with her besties or with her man. The real hard truths about love, life and S-E-X. And her words can hit harder than a Will Smith slap.

So it's not surprising that Sullivan's sold-out concert Tuesday night at the Fillmore Minneapolis was packed with Black women in their 20s and 30s. They could relate to her words. In fact, they knew almost all her words by heart.

Sullivan, a supreme vocalist, had three wonderful backup singers onstage and 1,500 more in the audience. Sometimes she invited the fans to sing a chorus or two, but most of the time they sang all the verses and the choruses anyway.

While Sullivan has topped both the Billboard R&B album and singles charts, the 33-year-old Philadelphia native may be best known to a wider audience for singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with country superstar Eric Church at the Super Bowl in 2021.

She holds the distinction, along with Bjork, of having the most Grammy nominations by a woman without winning, at 15. (The record for men is 18 for conductor Zubin Mehta, followed by Snoop Dogg with 17.) On Sunday, Sullivan is vying for three Grammys, including best R&B album for "Heaux Tales."

Following a winning opening set by eminently likable British singer Tiana Major9 (the crowd loved the hit "Collide"), Sullivan took the stage Tuesday in a silver trench coat over a silver bodysuit and surged into "Bodies," a look-in-the-mirror talk with herself about getting messed up and sleeping around. The girlfriends in the Fillmore knew what she was talking about.

Then she tore into her 2008 hit "Bust Your Windows," her torching of an unfaithful lover, and Sullivan's liberating, empowering messaging couldn't be stopped.

Sullivan's glorious pipes were on full display at the Fillmore, peaking on the kiss-off "In Love With Another Man" (from her 2008 debut "Fearless"), filled with jazzy vocal runs as she surrendered to the song and her new man.

The special ingredient on Sullivan's albums, especially "Heaux Tales" and this year's "Heaux Tales, Mo Tales: The Deluxe," are the spoken-word interludes that set the table for the next song. Sullivan essayed some pre-recorded interludes on Tuesday (one from Issa Rae before the tune "Insecure"), but the sound system rendered them less effective than they should have been.

Nonetheless, Sullivan's songs connected for 85 minutes, from the emphatic "Girl Like Me" (her 2021 collab with H.E.R.) to "BPW," a riotously raunchy discussion of sex not suitable for publication in the newspaper. But the "girls" like her at the Fillmore knew exactly what she was talking about.