Meshell Ndegeocello
Fire in the grooves

Meshell Ndegeocello's album No More Water is a tribute to the literary and political verve of James Baldwin.

It was in 2016, when Meshell Ndegeocello was playing live on stage in a collective performance in honour of James Baldwin (1924-1987), that her album was born. It was an experience that inspired the many long years of work on this magnificent album exploring the prose of the American writer. Having grown up in Harlem, poverty-stricken and oppressed, Baldwin considered becoming a pastor before devoting himself to art, and art alone, on the New York scene and later in France, where he finally drew his last breath.

Baldwin published a number of crucial books, including the gay novel Giovanni's Room (1956), an unconventional addition to a fiercely committed body of work that included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Another Country (1962) and The Fire Next Time (1963). In the form of a letter to his nephew, he deconstructs the pattern of violence imposed on the black American population. A close friend of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, celebrated by the likes of 2Pac and Jay-Z, a hundred years after his birth he is still an icon of the black cause. And of Ndegeocello who, following the success of her last album, The Omnichord Real Book, which earned her a Grammy, immersed herself body and soul in the subject of The Fire Next Time. “It’s as if they’re speaking about my family”, she explains in the album's liner notes, “especially the first chapter: I grew up around Black men who didn’t want to be seen as soft, which is how he opens A Letter to My Nephew.”

From baptism to resurrection, deciphering a thousand emotional nuances, including anger and hope, No More Water summons up Black Power on a hybrid and erudite sonic terrain, blending jazz, soul and spoken word. It's all served up by a tightly-knit team led by Ndegeocello, singer- songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer: guitarist Chris Bruce, Jamaican spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin, renowned for her book Crossfire: A Litany for Survival, singer Kenita- Miller Hicks and saxophonist Josh Johnson. A rich, militant album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin is one of the grooviest social manifestos we've heard this year.