The daring Meshell Ndegeocello follows up her 2023 GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Jazz Album for The Omnichord Real Book with the unyielding, outspoken, deeply immersive No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. The multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and producer culminates a project nearly a decade in the making by setting the activist’s views on Black oppression to music on the centennial of the iconic writer, James Baldwin, forty years after his passing.
This is a modern-day, more blistering approach than that of Gil Scott-Heron or the Black Power side of Nina Simone. Mixing Baldwin’s spoken words with music, the album somehow comes off as a fist-in-the-air multi-media performance akin to Laurie Anderson. Perhaps in its initial origins during 2016 as performed at The Harlem Stage Gatehouse, it may have had more than just the words and music. In any case, the imagery is inescapable due to Baldwin’s literary prowess and his passionate views and observations on the human condition. Today, in our divisive state, his words arguably resonate even more strongly.
Ndegeocello assembles much of the same cast as in her previous effort. Guitarist Chris Bruce co-produces alongside Ndegeocello with vocalist Justin Hicks and saxophonist Josh Johnson (and co-producer of The Omnichord Real Book) playing primary roles. Keyboardist Jebin Bruni and drummer Abe Rounds complete the core group with contributions from vocalist Kenita-Miller Hicks, keyboardists Jake Sherman and Julius Rodriguez, and trumpeter Paul Thompson. Spoken words are from venerated poet Staceyann Chin and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and critic Hilton Als.
Baldwin’s essays in The Fire Next Time allowed Ndegeocello to see her parents in a different light, as she says, “individuals in a society that’s been hard-wired for racism, bigotry, and classism.” The album title is, of course, borrowed from that same Baldwin book, centering on two essays examining racism in America in 1963. There is also the biblical quote in the book of Genesis: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/No more water, the fire next time.”
Baldwin was raised as the son of a Pentecostal preacher so the religious references and the Black church figure prominently. Opener “Travel” brings us into the mind of a man contemplating suicide over Rodriguez’s church-like organ, a choir led by Justin Hicks and complemented by Ndegeocello, Rounds, and Miller on the choruses behind Chin’s incantations.
Chin, unaccompanied, takes a raging, no-prisoners approach on “Raise the Roof” citing the disregard for Black lives in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island (“…Black bodies falling like leaves in late August.”) Ndegeocello counters with a more soothing musical vibe in “The Price of a Ticket,” with a folk approach resembling that of ‘60s Dylan or Odetta with a modern-day hymn of dissent where her words ring powerfully – “Don’t let them shoot me down, and I die.” Very little here is remotely tame. Revolutionary cries course through “Trouble” with its militaristic drums, In the rallying exclamations of “Thus Sayeth The Lorde,” and “Tsunami Rising” as well as in two sides of the same coin per Baldwin in “Love” and “Hate.”
As a gay woman, Ndegeocello also relates to Baldwin’s own homosexuality as articulated in “Pride I & II,” one of the few places where we hear her famed dub bass over a groove-laden West African beat. Her identity and Baldwin’s merge, as Als summarily states in the liners, “…a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen.”
Speaking of listening, it is not all vitriol; there is an eloquent balance. Listen to the Marvin Gaye -like vocals of Hicks in “Eyes,” the haunting guitar of Bruce accompanying Ndegeocello and Hicks in the dirge “Down at the Cross” and Johnson alone on saxophone accompanying Chin in “Baldwin Manifesto 1 & II”.
This scathingly provocative, intense work is overwhelming to digest in one listen. It well could become a landmark recording.
