Meshell Ndegeocello – No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

After a fulsome embrace of jazz and roots music on her Blue Note debut The Omnichord Real Book – where she laid down her spear and traded sweet grooves with the likes of Joel Ross, Jeff Parker, Ambrose Akinmusire and Brandee Younger while the distinctive chimes of her harp-like instrument also stretched in the direction of seventies go-go and strung-out psychedelic soul – then compering The Magic City which was released earlier this year as the fourth iteration of the Red Hot & Ra project, for her second Blue Note album Meshell Ndegeocello pays homage to James Baldwin, on a record which is neatly timed to coincide with the centennial of the author’s birth.

Billed as somewhere between a celebration, a church service and a call to action, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin touches upon everything from our pleasure centres to collective catastrophes, honing in on Baldwin’s own struggles as an artist and civil rights activist, and carrying the baton into the present as Ndegeocello and her cast of collaborators repeatedly call out the legacies of slavery, police brutality, the prison industrial complex and the complicities of the justice system, with an intersectional understanding drawn all the way from Sojourner Truth to Audre Lorde and bell hooks of the violence and inequity which has hitherto been the lot of black women.

Meshell Ndegeocello, who in retrospect describes her breakthrough studio album Plantation Lullabies as a necessary catharsis redolent of a righteous youth, turned to the works of James Baldwin almost a decade ago when she read the ‘life-changing’ essays of The Fire Next Time then composed what The New York Times described as an ‘almost indefinable work of music theatre’ based on the texts for a production which played in the fall of 2016 at the Harlem Stage. Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin already centered the voices of Justin Hicks and Staceyann Chin, with a segment entitled ‘Raise the Roof’, fragments from Baldwin’s notes on hatred and the phrase ‘No more water, the fire next time’ as a refrain, which also serves as the epigraph to Baldwin’s book.

Baldwin took the title and epigraph of The Fire Next Time from the popular spiritual ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, a song first recorded in 1915 by the Fisk Jubilee Singers which has since been interpreted by everyone from Lead Belly and Bessie Jones to The Caravans and Aretha Franklin as the introduction to her bestselling 1972 live album Amazing Grace, to James Brown and The Famous Flames and the posthumous release of a 1983 piano and microphone session by Prince. ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time’ read the lyrics, and from the outset Ndegeocello infuses No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin with a kaleidoscopic sound palette even as her own snarling and susurrating vocals hiss behind the gospel harmonies of the leads.

Pressure is a constant theme on the album, whether it’s the vibration of bass and guitar strings or breath pushing through reeds, the weight of expectations self-imposed and societal, an atmospheric pressure or one’s gorge steadily rising from within. ‘Travel’ takes us inside the mind of a man on the verge of suicide, while ‘On the Mountain’ expands on an image from the poet Amiri Baraka, who described Baldwin upon his death as ‘God’s black revolutionary mouth’.

Staceyann Chin offers a spoken word rendition of excerpts from Baldwin’s famous speech on ‘The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity’, which segues into her own screed about police violence, ‘Raise the Roof’ which along with the opener ‘Travel’ was the first piece from No More Water to be released. In prose of gushing ferocity she states that white supremacy ‘must be in the fucking water, being force fed to the police, the prosecutor and the politicians who care nothing for black bodies falling like leaves in late August in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island only minutes away from where my own child sits watching the Muppets take over Manhattan’, suggesting that we seem to moving backwards through history as she bears witness even with a ‘helpless bile rising angry in my chest’.

The first half of No More Water is defined by juxtapositions both signal and sonic, from private despair and fiery indignation to calls for a closer and more encompassing community. ‘Raise the Roof’ is immediately followed by a country-hued spiritual in ‘The Price of the Ticket’ and the bronzed neo soul and bass harmonics of ‘What Did I Do?’, which calls back to Plantation Lullabies and other genre-defining works of the nineties by the likes of D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, then climbs through rousing handclaps to become a sort of torch song in the manner of Irving Berlin’s near namesake, candlelit and anthemic, carried by the elliptical yet spellbinding voice of Justin Hicks.

Drum batteries and Afro-Cuban rhythms accompany the crunching guitars and synths of ‘Pride I’, with a spoken word passage from a French translation of The Fire Next Time serving as a bridge to the bass and organ and the bounding claves of ‘Pride II’, one of the funkiest tracks on the album which highlights Jake Sherman on the Hammond and Jebin Bruni behind the keyboards, with Ndegeocello’s roiling dub textures rubbing against the bold and militaristic hand of Abe Rounds as Justin Hicks provides another standout vocal and the versatile Chris Bruce, who co-produced the record, shreds away on the guitar.

‘Eyes’ an emotive soul ballad opens with a fragmented reading from ‘Here be Dragons’, which is a critique of masculinity and a reckoning with our essential androgyny, as the Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza echoes Baldwin’s line ‘We all react to and, to whatever extent, become what the eye sees’. With the same sort of tone but more dolorous, ‘Trouble’ is a paean for change that reckons with the onerous and even stultifying difficulty of the task ahead.

Another voice enters the mix as ‘Thus Sayeth The Lorde’ interpolates the poem ‘A Litany for Survival’ and the essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ by Audre Lorde, before ‘Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without’ as another quotation from The Fire Next Time is bedecked in propulsive drums and doo-doo vocals, with a squelching bass and soaring lines from Hicks supported by Kenita Miller, then a few melodious guitar strums in the final moments of the track which prove redolent of so many late sixties and early seventies Motown classics.

The opposite of love, on the next track the duo of Hicks and Ndegeocello recite in unison Baldwin’s words on hatred, with an ache and an air of the prevailing fear or apprehensiveness saying ‘I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain’. Drum rolls and the vibrato of the Hammond organ imbue the track with a spectral quiver, conjuring a vast interstellar space as Hicks surfs those waves through a limpid vocal performance. The longest piece on the album, ‘Tsunami Rising’ features another poem from Chin who evokes the transatlantic slave trade through the eyes and experiences of black women, aided only by a few blurts from Josh Johnson on the tenor sax.

An intersectional reading which summons the horrors of a people captured and traded like loot and children tossed overboard, sometimes in acts of desperation, while with a smidgeon of irony casting the generations who have been cut off from their ancestral homes, ‘Tsunami Rising’ is also a cascading diatribe against the white patriarchy, honing in with specificity on their groping hands and protruding penises while both celebrating and critiquing the #MeToo movement, which was devised by a black women but continues to strike them from the contemporary discourse. Bearing disproportionately the weight of all this sexual violence, Chin summons a lineage of truth seekers and freedom fighters from Harriet Tubman to Winnie Mandela, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, as she adopts Baldwin’s epigraph to make a vow on behalf of black women everywhere, repeating ‘No more water, the fire next time’ as saxophone flares and drones sustain a steady glow.

Red brown and gold brown in lyric and tenor, the plangent ‘Another Country’ with a grittier vocal from Hicks is a lush call for a do-over, with its verdant swirl of strings and keys making the song the closest thing to a contemporary smash on the record.

‘Baldwin Manifesto II’ returns to the artist’s struggle, and on the album closer ‘Down at the Cross’ it is Ndegeocello who shares vocal duties with Hicks over throbbing strings and keys which almost sound like plucks on the doson ngoni, a final phantasm which bends at the knee in the face of the byzantine and never-ending battle to live free of anger and doubt, our lives mere droplets in a fathomless pool of water, before the voice of the trumpeter and educator Paul Thompson offers a final course correction, as he repeats the words ‘Page by page, break the spine, slowly, until it is worn’ as a cut-up, suggesting that self-torment and other cycles of abuse can only be beat and our duties as artists and activists only be met through daily and painstaking acts of a conscious resistance.