Slick
Fontaine

Slick Fontaine has been in the room longer than most people know.

Born Solomon Franklin Fontaine on Detroit's west side on November 8, 1972, he came up in a city that was making music the way it made cars — with precision, with intention, and with the understanding that what you built was supposed to last. His early work in the late 1980s and early '90s developed a style that was less about performance and more about presence: a spoken storyteller's voice over live music, concerned with the texture of everyday transactions, the weight of small decisions, the accounting of a life.

He called it the Night Ledger. The Royal Palace became his proving ground. He built a room full of people who came not knowing what to expect and stayed longer than they planned. The Night Ledger drew label attention and a deal meeting. In 1995, he signed nothing and walked away from the table.

What came after was not a breakdown. It was a recalibration that lasted almost thirty years. He opened a shop. He kept making music — session work, uncredited. Writing for others. The music never stopped. He just wasn't signing it.

In 2022, at fifty years old, he began assembling what is now a ten-track catalog — music drawn directly from the life he actually lived. He is releasing through Crooked Staff Records, the imprint he runs himself. There is no intermediary, no management layer, no one between him and the decision about when the music goes out into the world.

He is fifty-three in August 2026. He has been here the whole time.

The Night Ledger ran from 1991 to 1995. Spoken storytelling over live funk, soul, and jazz. A voice that sat just above the bass line and just below the melody. The band called him Professor. The room called him back.

CeCe Monroe gave him a Thursday at The Royal Palace early on. She stood at the edge of the bar with her arms crossed and watched. The woman by the door still hadn't left. CeCe uncrossed her arms. She knew what she was looking at.

The Night Ledger earned him a deal. The deal collapsed in 1995. He walked out of the room without signing. Isaiah sat in the parking lot the whole time. He was still there when Solomon came out.

The Night Ledger ended. The music didn't.

Twenty-four years. 1996 to 2019. He is not gone. He is unwitnessed.

He opened a shop. He kept making music — session work, uncredited. Writing for others. The shop was how the craft kept going. The craft was why the shop was worth running. He did both for thirty years.

His sister Lorraine did his books free from a Sunday kitchen table from 1999 to 2008. Nine years. A shoebox of receipts. In 2003 she set a sheet in front of him with four numbers on it. He sat with it longer than she expected. He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. "Thank you." Not the quick kind. The kind that costs something to say.

In 2019, Isaiah had a health scare. Solomon sat in a hospital corridor for six hours. He decided not to be guessed at. The return began.

Funk, soul, R&B, rap, and spoken storytelling — with gospel, jazz, and cinematic color when the record calls for it. It carries Detroit in the low end, the old neighborhoods in the melody, and the present city in the delivery.

Influences: Detroit soul, funk, Blaxploitation cinema, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, rap, Cadillac culture, tailoring, nocturnal city life. A man who has watched Detroit change without pretending the change was simple.

Crooked Staff Records. Independent. On purpose. The sound of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and has decided to do it on his own terms.

Crooked Staff Records LLC. Detroit. Independent. The label that moves when it wants to move, releases when the music is ready, and answers to nobody but the artist and the audience.

He has been in a room where someone else held the paper, and he knows what that costs. There is no other way he would do this.

Slick Fontaine is the flagship. The catalogue is growing. The deal is not done.