Not only for its shout-out in The Roots’ “You Got Me” (“She said she loved my show in Paris at Élysée Montmartre”) has the 203-year-old Élysée Montmartre music hall become known as a French haven for neo-soul. Diverse African-American soul soldiers like Bilal and Meshell Ndegéocello have played to standing-room-only crowds there lately, adding to the venue’s lengthy list of singer-songwriters who continue stretching the genre’s boundaries into the 2010s. Following a tepid warm-up set by Detroitan R&B singer Dwele, neo-soul vet Angie Stone recently brought fire to 1,200 of Paris’s bourgeois bohêmes.

Commanding a seven-piece band decked out in Angie Stone tour T-shirts, the songstress whose artistry is timeless, began her hour-long set with “Play with It” (off 2007’s The Art of Love & War). And when she belted out the “you don’t wanna mess with me” refrain, truer words were never spoken. The 48-year-old singer began her career in the late ’70s as a third of pioneering female rap crew The Sequence. So when she exhorted the French to “wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care” and ran her “somebody, anybody, everybody scream!” routine, there was no pretense. Stone has more hiphop cred than the microwave pop stars half her age.

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