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The Music of Avant

Seventeen tracks from a Cleveland singer who has been quietly making excellent records for twenty-five years. Avant is the definition of underrated.

Myron Avant

Avant is from Cleveland and was discovered by Steve Huff, who produced his early material. His 2000 debut My Thoughts arrived at a moment when male R&B was crowded, and he has spent the quarter-century since releasing consistently strong albums to consistently modest attention.

His voice is a light, agile tenor with a distinctive slightly nasal quality, and his records sit in the traditional lane — slow tempos, real songwriting, relationships examined at length. He is a genuine album artist who happened to have a few large singles.

The KeKe Wyatt partnership is the thing most people know him for, and it produced two of the best R&B duets of the era.

What to listen for

"My First Love" with KeKe Wyatt is a cover of the René & Angela song and is the record that made both of them. Wyatt was seventeen when she recorded it, and her performance is astonishing.

"You & I" is their second pairing and the more mature of the two.

"Separated" is his signature solo record — the debut single, and the one that established the template of a man reasoning his way through a breakup rather than performing devastation.

"Read Your Mind"-era material and "Don't Take Your Love Away" are the deeper singles. "When It Hurts" and "Kiss Goodbye" — both Underdogs productions, and "Kiss Goodbye" appears here twice — are the most sophisticated arrangements in his catalogue.

"Lie About Us" with Nicole Scherzinger is the crossover attempt and works better than it should.

"Sailing" is the Christopher Cross song, which is an unexpected choice and a rather lovely one.

"4 Minutes," "Sensuality" and "Y.O.U." round out the picture.

Go deeper

My Thoughts (2000) and Ecstasy (2002) are the two albums to start with.

KeKe Wyatt deserves her own investigation — a formidable singer whose career has been repeatedly interrupted, and whose Soul Sista is worth finding.

For the lane: Joe, Tank, Case and Carl Thomas are the contemporaries, and all four are similarly under-discussed. There is a whole generation of male R&B singers from roughly 1998 to 2008 whose catalogues are far better than their current profiles suggest.

One final point about longevity. Avant has released albums steadily for twenty-five years without a reinvention, a scandal or a comeback narrative, which is why he is rarely written about. That consistency is the achievement. A singer who can still fill rooms two decades after his last major radio single has built something more durable than a moment, and the catalogue rewards being worked through in order rather than sampled.

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