Artist: Meshell Ndegeocello
Album: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
Genre: Neo-Soul, Jazz-Funk
Label: Blue Note
Released: 2024
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Travel (4:10)
- On the Mountain (5:59)
- Baldwin Manifesto I (0:43)
- Raise the Roof (5:07)
- The Price of the Ticket (1:34)
- What Did I Do? (5:19)
- Pride I (2:54)
- Pride II (2:38)
- Eyes (5:17)
- Trouble (7:18)
- Thus Sayeth the Lorde (5:40)
- Love (3:43)
- Hatred (5:29)
- Tsunami Rising (8:04)
- Another Country (4:47)
- Baldwin Manifesto II (2:07)
- Down at the Cross (5:43)
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No More Water followed Meshell Ndegeocello's Sun Ra celebration The Magic City by four months and arrived on the centennial birthday of its subject, the incomparable writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin. It closes an informal trilogy of commemorative recordings from Ndegeocello that began with Pour Une Âme Souveraine, dedicated to Baldwin's beloved Nina Simone. At the same time, No More Water is an outgrowth of a theatrical production the musician presented in 2016 at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Impelled by Baldwin's The Fire Next Time -- an essential text that gave her a profound comprehension of racism, classism, and the effects of both on her family -- Ndegeocello conceived the performance as a Pan-African church service with an ensemble of instrumentalists, singers, and orators. Many of the participants are involved here, and Baldwin's words are woven into eight of the 17 tracks, whether sung by the pained if undaunted Justin Hicks on the rippling funk of "On the Mountain," or recited by Jamaican poet and activist Staceyann Chin on "Baldwin Manifesto I" and "Baldwin Manifesto II." The pieces that don't quote Baldwin are often equally charged, freighted with anguish. Take Chin's declamatory "Raise the Roof." Backed only by phantasmal saxophone and effects from Josh Johnson, Chin, tightly coiled, rails against police brutality, a rigged justice system, and "a lack of white accountability parading as a penal system in which 40% of those incarcerated come from a group which only consists of 12% of the entire fucking population." Just as gripping is the brief folk song that follows, "The Price of a Ticket" -- what could be called a ditty if Ndegeocello wasn't making a gentle appeal to be spared by an armed officer. In a way, the album is, to use a description Ndegeocello used for her fourth full-length, an anthropological mixtape. It's constantly switching gears in terms of structure and sound. Songs slowly unfurl or unexpectedly intensify, quickly settle into a groove or change direction, are adjoined with spoken interludes and interjections, and yet a sense of flow is maintained. In addition to its funk and folk components, the album blurs 21st century jazz and soul with elements of soukous, samba, dub, and art rock. Additionally, Baldwin isn't the only writer/activist from which the album gleans influence. "Thus Sayeth the Lorde" pays tribute to Audre Lorde, the fellow writer/activist who challenged Baldwin on gender in a historic conversation published in Essence magazine. Chin most certainly embodies the "feminist warrior" aspect of Lorde's self-identity in the subsequent "Tsunami Rising." For all the pain the material relates, there's an unwavering sense of communality and even some joy; the uplifting "Love" is a reminder that Ndegeocello remains a masterful hook writer and reinterpreter. No More Water concludes with a looped and layered mantra for bookworms. The words, voiced by multi-instrumentalist Paul Thompson, shift and repeat for over a minute, echoing Ndegeocello's hope that the album provokes listeners to read Baldwin's undiminishable writings and take them to heart.
Review by Andy Kellman