Meshell Ndegeocello
No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
BLUE NOTE
On last year’s The Omnichord Real Book—her first release for the venerated Blue Note label—bassist/composer Meshell Ndegeocello took a trip into the furthest recesses of her musical imagination, creating a delightfully freewheeling synthesis of jazz and funk, Afrobeat grooves and piano balladry. Just a year later, she’s back with an equally wild and wooly trip. There’s one key distinction: This time around, her tour guide is none other than the late James Baldwin.
Ndegeocello has made no secret of her devotion to Baldwin’s writings, heralding his seminal collection The First Next Time as a personal scripture—her map and compass for navigating issues of race, identity, political action, and creativity. Released on what would be his 100th birthday, Ndegeocello pays tribute to Baldwin’s righteous witness with No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, a 75-minute opus that’s teeming with big ideas and vivid emotions, applying Baldwin’s moral and spiritual rigor to Black experience in contemporary America.
Joining the Blue Note label has clearly galvanized Ndegeocello toward a borderless approach to music-making. Where previous albums have flitted between different disciplines and idioms, her more recent work is proudly sprawling and cross-pollinated. Like its predecessor, No More Water is stacked with collaborators from the jazz world, but veers often and easily into speaker-rattling funk and psychedelic soul. Driven by a droning organ refrain, opener “Travel” is informed by grooving dubstep, while “Pride I” borrows its unrelenting rhyme from Fela Kuti. At the other end of the spectrum is the spacy “What Did I Do?,” which adapts a Fats Waller anthem into something slow, bruised, and bluesy.
Befitting an album-long tribute to Baldwin, No More Water is an egoless celebration of community; it’s not until the fifth song, a folksy reprieve called “The Price of the Ticket,” that you clearly hear Ndegeocello at the microphone. Much of the heavy lifting here is done by guest singers and players, foremost among them the Jamaican poet Staceyann Chin and Pulitzer-winning author Hilton Als, whose spoken-word meditations reflect Baldwin’s own political and intellectual rigor. The words here are as important as the music, and often they’re nearly as striking as Baldwin’s: Over the course of five minutes, “Raise the Roof” imagines the kind of clarity and conviction the writer might have brought to the long tail of state-sanctioned violence against Black people, up to and including Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin.
Such unflinching meditations can make No More Water a harrowing listen, yet there are also moments of hope, connective tissue that grounds the album in love, community, and the witness of history itself. Gospel flourishes, including a rousing choral effect on “Love,” bring balance to the album’s dark churn. It’s a fitting way to honor the life of a writer who chronicled Black struggle with unmatched acuity, yet also bore the title of reluctant optimist. With No More Water, Ndegeocello offers an engrossing tribute to Baldwin’s continuing legacy as a witness-bearer and creative lodestar.
