Le Bataclan, a 19th century theater in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris, is a notorious sweatbox, and sold-out crowds don’t help the sticky situation any. For the second night in a row, wall-to-wall French folks packed in tight to catch neo-soul pioneer Raphael Saadiq performing his one-man Motortown Revue. The Chinese-style auditorium killed the lights around nine, as the ghost of Marvin Gaye started crooning “The Star-Spangled Banner” in that famous recording from an early 1980s NBA game. When the suited-up five-piece band sashayed onstage one by one, you couldn’t separate the live crowd’s cries from the sports fans’ of decades ago.

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