His new label: 5-time nominee

First, there was the bad news for Raphael Saadiq.

The night before the Grammy nominations were announced last month, the neo-soul singer went to bed dispirited. Word was out: The music trades were officially reporting what he already knew. His label, Universal Records, which last summer released his first solo disc, “Instant Vintage,” had “amicably” but unceremoniously dropped him.

That made way for the good:

The very next morning, Saadiq was roused early from bed to learn that he’d scored five Grammy nods -- the same number as Bruce Springsteen, Eminem and Norah Jones, among others. “My assistant called,” he recalls, rearing back in an Aeron chair in front of the main console at his North Hollywood studio complex, “and I went back to sleep.”

That blase-blase attitude has remained his operating mode. Since the nominations, Saadiq -- founder of Tony! Toni! Tone!, the R&B-funk; trio -- has been proceeding at a business-as-usual pace. He’s got a full chart of producing duties -- for, among others, Warren G., who is slated to drop by to lay down some tracks. And there’s work on his next album.

The Grammy nods -- including best R&B; album for “Instant Vintage” and as a writer for best R&B; song for both “Be Here” and “Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop)” -- catapulted Saadiq into the public’s eye. But after 15 years in the music world trenches, he knows rewards don’t always come quickly.

“It’s nothing I can really measure yet,” Saadiq says. “But it’s definitely an accolade that people really look at. One that gives you credibility. Especially, if you’re not a very loud publicity type of person, which I’m not,” he adds. “People know me from my work. But it makes me think now that I do have to capitalize on it.”

When “Instant Vintage” arrived in June, it was greeted with enthusiastic critical buzz. With a hip-hop heartbeat, the album spins out a vibrant collage of songs, shot through with Saadiq’s own somnolent bass lines and pleading vocals -- dotted with a shock of strings, sparkly Latin fringes, a tuba line or two. The hope was that with a little grass-roots buzz and radio love it would ignite. But it didn’t happen.

Feeling that Universal didn’t actively promote the album, he crafted his own publicity campaign and financed his own video for the single “Still Ray.”

“I’m not mad at them. It was just the wrong place for my record. And sometimes you just have to walk away, just sayin’, ‘You still have your talent.’ ”

For its part, Universal maintains that it did indeed pull its weight. “We were extremely supportive of the project,” says Wendy Washington, senior vice president, publicity. “We sponsored his tour and were passionate about him.”

Saadiq keeps stepping. Over the years, as a producer, he’s found new life and sound for groups such as the Isley Brothers and Bee Gees, and he’s created provocative musical platforms for Angie Stone, TLC, Ginuwine and Macy Gray.

“We haven’t changed the way we do things,” says Anette Sharvit, general manager of Saadiq’s producing ventures Pookie Records and Whiskey Slew Productions, who has seen only a minor spike in album sales but is fielding interest from talk shows. Shopping for his own label deal has been a primary focus. “Creative freedom is ... going to be the deciding factor.”

The hope is now that this higher profile will translate into money to take a full band out to tour. But Saadiq makes it plain, the deal-sealer comes tonight: “If you win, it could be different.”

“It was great closure for me, for the record,” he says about the nominations. “Because, I tell everybody, I love my record from A to Z. But with the Grammys ... my name got to ring with some of the top sellers this year, so I got a chance to bite into whatever they were doing.”