Willow Performs ‘Petal Rock Black’ at Jazzy Blue Note Debut in L.A.

Few music artists must contend with the weight of pre-conceived notions as heavy as Willow Smith, but watching her perform live, it’s surprisingly easy to forget them all. Her output is intense, but her execution is unencumbered, vulnerable, and joyful. It’s also weird and hungry enough to block out any nepo noise that might still be lingering for those not familiar with her wide-ranging work. 

Celebrating her new album, petal rock black, which surprise-dropped on Feb. 16, the singer and musician offered two intimate performances at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Hollywood to showcase the material. It was a packed room for the late set, and Willow (who doesn’t use her last name as an artist) had the crowd enraptured as she played tracks from the artsy jazz-pop opus.

“My album is out and it was 100 percent produced by me,” she shared near the end of the set. “It was my first time ever doing that.” 

The 25-year-old is focused on furthering the experimental journey of her last few six recordings, especially 2024’s Grammy-nominated empathogen, which featured collabs with Jon Batiste and St. Vincent. The new record opens with a spoken word intro from the funk father himself, George Clinton, which somewhat belies its lack of buoyant grooves, but sets the tone for its poetic and often esoteric themes.

The beckoning follows in the form of “Vegetation,” a breezy loop-driven bee-bop, which Willow opened with last night, followed by the breathy seduction of “Hear Me Out,” an emotive exploration of relationship dynamics — a recurring theme in her music over the years. Her self-reflections have always landed better than love laments though, and there’s plenty of these on the new one.

The daughter of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, and sister to Jaden Smith, has grown up before our eyes, and she’s obviously struggled to find her place in the business ever since she scored a hit at 10 years-old with the dance floor jam “Whip My Hair.” But being around music — hip-hop, pop, and even metal (her mom’s rock band Wicked Wisdom) — has clearly been formative. 

For anyone who’s intently listened to her various releases and collabs, it was never about proving her talent. Willow’s vocals have always been madly robust, and they’ve brought a haunted resonance to everything she’s worked on, especially her collaborations with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker (“Emo Girl”), Yungblud (“Memories”), and PinkPantheress (“Where Are You?”), all of which came out in 2022, a year that also marked challenges for her parents in the public sphere and might have pushed her creative liberation further. 

Either way, by the next year, she really grew as a performer and a songwriter. Her 2023 Coachella performance was killer as was her Tiny Desk show the following year. She expanded empathogen with a deluxe version called ceremonial contrafact, which featured revered composer and saxophonist Kamasi Washington. He returns on the hypnotic “Play,” a standout on petal rock black, along with a shimmering collab by Oakland’s Tune-Yards called “Omnipotent.”  She refrained from playing the new album’s effects-laden cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” during the set we saw, but the artist’s influence on her overall is palpable. 

Dressed in a simple black dress with her long braids tied up until she let them down near the show’s end, Willow shared that she was a bit nervous on stage. She spoke of 2025 being a tough year for everyone with “some weird shit going on,” but added that right now, we’re all finding our “spiritual warrior type energy.” 

She channeled this on guitar and at the mic without it, crooning some songs soft and breathy, and others bold and ruminant, which brought to mind everyone from Erykah Badu to Tori Amos depending on the piano, drum, and bass arrangement. She shouted out her band and gave them each time to shine (there was even a drum solo), and spoke of the significance of the Blue Note and its opening which she attended last summer.

It’s hard to codify the new release as any one genre, but it’s definitely not a pop or rock record, and that’s by design. Leaning most heavily toward soulful jazz fusion with elements of tribal rhythm, it was perfect for the room. And while it remains to be seen if petal rock black will appeal to the Gen Z crowd who’ve made her a star in her own right, she seems unconcerned with mainstream hit potential right now. Yes, she has the luxury to explore new ideas and play with whoever she wants, but she also seems to understand what a blessing that is. 

Focused on deep personal expression created alone in the studio (as touted in album’s promo trailer), her record release performance demonstrated that the best if most challenging part of self discovery is sharing it with others. She also proved that she’s gracious and skilled enough to pull it off.