Stevie Wonder and an All-Star Ensemble Keep Sly Stone’s Groove Moving

The 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony opened with a shared celebration of Sly Stone’s music. Stevie Wonder joined Jennifer Hudson, Maxwell, Beck, Flea, Questlove and Leon Thomas in a tribute built around an ensemble spirit. Their gathering suited a catalog whose energy depends on the exchange between distinct voices and players, making collaboration part of the remembrance itself.

Stone’s death in June 2025 gave the occasion a memorial purpose. Sly and the Family Stone had brought gospel, psychedelic rock, dance rhythms and socially engaged writing into an influential musical combination. The tribute acknowledged that loss through the continuing life of the material. The performers could express gratitude by making the songs move together in front of a new audience.

A medley allowed several sides of the catalog to appear within one performance. “Dance to the Music” began the sequence with an invitation particularly appropriate to a group of contrasting musicians. Its spirit makes space for individual contributions within a larger band. Opening there established the gathering’s shared character and gave the performers a natural way to begin their exchange.

Wonder’s participation brought another history of adventurous popular music into the tribute. His own work joins expressive playing with an interest in the possibilities of production and songwriting. On this stage, his presence helped connect that experience with the music being honored. The performance gave the audience a direct encounter between artists whose histories meet around a shared appreciation of Stone’s work.

Maxwell stepped into the lead for “Everyday People,” changing the medley’s emphasis while keeping its sense of community intact. The song’s familiar appeal to shared humanity belongs beside its rhythmic accessibility. Within a tribute performed by musicians from different traditions, those qualities reinforced one another. The sequence could make room for the writing’s message as well as the movement of its groove.

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Beck and Flea added their own character, with Questlove maintaining the rhythmic foundation. The different backgrounds of the lineup were part of what made the combination engaging. Rock, rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop connections could meet within music that had already helped shape a broad vocabulary of popular performance. Individual styles remained audible while the ensemble kept a common musical direction.

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” brought the bass-driven side of that vocabulary into focus. Its connection with Larry Graham’s influential approach to the instrument made Flea’s contribution particularly fitting. The bass line does more than sit beneath the song. Its attack and shape help determine how the groove feels, making instrumental character a central part of the music’s identity.

Hudson supplied a different kind of force in the closing “I Want to Take You Higher.” Her lead helped move the performance toward an expansive finish, supported by the ensemble’s continuing momentum. The ending gained its energy from the sequence around it. The earlier songs had established a musical conversation, allowing the final vocal lift to feel like the culmination of a shared tribute.

The players brought their own sounds to the material rather than treating the occasion as an exact reconstruction. That approach kept attention on the freedom and responsiveness within Stone’s music. A tribute can acknowledge its source while allowing performers to make expressive decisions in the present. Here, the interaction among the musicians provided a way of showing respect through active reinterpretation.

Sly and the Family Stone entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Their mixed-gender, integrated lineup and the stylistic reach of their songs had already secured a place in popular-music history. The later tribute returned attention to those achievements through performance. After Stone’s death, musicians could revisit the catalog within an institution that had recognized the band decades earlier.

The continued reach of the recordings can be heard in later sampling, covers and the habits of musicians who absorbed their ideas. A listener need not identify every connection to feel the rhythmic language at work. Those ideas have traveled into other musical settings, helping explain why a medley of older songs can still sound immediate through a new group of performers.

The lineup also offered several points of entry for younger listeners. Someone drawn by Hudson’s voice or Flea’s playing could encounter songs they had not explored before. The changing selections made that discovery easier, supplying different melodic and rhythmic starting points. A medley can introduce a catalog by leaving an audience curious about whichever passage stays in the ear afterward.

The collaboration’s common focus is what holds those personalities together. Each artist has an individual reputation, but the songs provide the reason for sharing the stage. Their contributions become most effective when they clarify the material and respond to the surrounding players. The tribute’s strength comes through the relationship between recognized musicians and the catalog they have gathered to celebrate.

Stone’s influence reaches beyond any one ceremony, but the Rock Hall stage offered a place to experience part of it directly. Different generations met through a groove that remained available to them as living musical material. The performance made the case through sound: musicians continued to find possibilities in the songs, and the audience could hear those possibilities developing between them.

Changes of lead voice helped sustain that sense of conversation. A new singer provided another way into the material, while the ensemble carried continuity through each transition. The structure suited a band whose own identity depended on the contributions of multiple people. The medley honored that principle by keeping individual expression within the movement of an adventurous shared sound.

The final impression was one of celebration carried through remembrance. Wonder’s role, Hudson’s closing power and the instrumental exchange gave the gathering its particular shape, while Stone’s songs remained the center. The performance offered a reason to return to the original Family Stone recordings: the gratitude expressed onstage was grounded in music that the ensemble could still make feel lively and immediate.

More performances to enjoy

Lady Gaga’s “I Wish” at the Stevie Wonder GRAMMY salute offers another tribute built around entering a familiar rhythmic world with a distinctive voice.

Wonder’s live “Superstition” on Sesame Street provides an earlier television setting in which to hear the band interaction and groove central to his music.