A bit of a spoiler here: At the end of Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, a lone male voice repeats variations of several short phrases, some looped over each other:
Break the spine page by page
Break the spine until it’s worn
Read it. Read it. Read it.
And read it until it’s worn
It goes on for a few minutes. You could imagine it going forever, like the “inner groove” at the end of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” It stays in the mind, regardless.
“That’s my brother, Paul,” Ndegeocello says on an audio call from her Brooklyn home.
She’s using “brother” spiritually, not genetically. The voice belongs to her dear friend Paul Thompson. He’s a musician, but also an educator, currently the executive director of the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Arts and Special Projects. It’s in both capacities that he’s served as one of Ndegeocello’s collaborators on this project, which originated as Can I Get a Witness?, a multimedia piece created by Ndegeocello in 2016, commissioned by and presented at the Harlem Stage.
For that, the singer-bassist-composer assembled a community of musicians, poets, and actors to bring to life the spirit of Baldwin. Set in a space resembling the kind of church in which Baldwin grew up and, as a boy, preached, it mixed words and music by the members of the cast, as well as some of Baldwin’s writings.
“In the theatrical piece [Thompson] shows you how to read a book,” she says. “He talks about how you treat the book, the information in the introduction, the first page, talks about printing of a book. But there’s also something within the way he says it.”
The loop heard on the album—which is being released by Blue Note Records on Aug. 2, the centennial of Baldwin’s birth, with a full Celebrate Brooklyn performance at the Lena Horne Bandshell in Prospect Park—was conceived by singer-actor Justin Hicks, also one of the prime collaborators.
“It’s kind of like—it feels like the body,” she says. “Like the slave body. You listen to this and you leave with sorrow, which will eventually turn into a buoyancy, because you must make the best of this life. You must make the best of it. And I hope that this country does it in the best way possible so that fewer people have the suffering. I know suffering is just a part of life. But, you know, we’re on a precipice. And I know I sound like probably every other weirdo rando, but you know, you feel the change.”
She laughs. “Can’t you feel it coming?”
Whatever that change may be?
“Yes. Baldwin says, ‘One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.’ And that’s what I’m doing. I’m just trying to have a good time. I’m trying to ride the waves and be in the sunshine and have a good time and read some good books.”
One book in particular is at the hub of this: Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. The slim volume, published in 1963, stands perhaps even above the author-activist’s brilliant novels as his most impactful work, a profound, personal account of the Black experience in America that quickly became one of the pillar texts of the Civil Rights fight and remains as powerful today as it was then.
Ndegeocello didn’t just read it. She made it part of her very being. “I spent a year with the book, living with it, literally walking around with it,” she says of the time she was creating the theater production. “I read it over and over and over.”
It’s made up of two essays, the brief, impassioned “My Dungeon Shook,” written as a letter to his teenage nephew in 1962 and originally appearing in The Progressive magazine to mark the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the longer “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind,” which had been published in The New Yorker, built on vividly detailed accounts of Baldwin’s troubled times as a teen pastor in a Harlem church and a later, unsatisfying meeting with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. The ominous title of the book combining the two came from the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep,” which also provided Ndegeocello her title for the homage:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t given that book [earlier in my life],” she says. “I knew his novels, the fiction. But these essays were life-changing. It just really made me soften my heart towards my parents. I’m born in 1968, my parents were born in the ‘40s. I cannot imagine what they experienced before civil rights. And this just gave me the history that I didn’t get in school. My father was in the military. I went to public schools, but it was a pretty generic education with a certain sort-of slant towards history. And even though people had seen Roots, there’s nothing like the Baldwin book because it explains succinctly and clearly what it was like to grow up in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, which I think is a time period we’re not really told about, except in a very specific way.”
The stories Ndegeocello sought to tell are rooted in that era, but planted very much in the present. To accomplish this she assembled a remarkable crew, generously sharing the creative processes. Most of the songs list all of the performers as writers, and Ndegeocello often hands over lead roles to others, primarily Hicks, guitarist and co-producer Chris Bruce, drummer Abe Rounds, keyboardists Jake Sherman and Jebin Bruni, and bassist Julius Rodriguez.
Hicks, whose wife, Kenita Miller, also sings on several songs, was a revelation. “He was actually working on Broadway for sound design,” Ndegeocello says. “He’d sung, but it wasn’t his main thing.”
You’d never know it. Hicks sounds like a veteran musical theater star, taking lead vocals as much as Ndegeocello does. Elsewhere, significant portions of the album are given to spoken word by poet Staceyann Chin, culture critic Hilton Als, Caroline Fontineau (a jazz publicist here representing Baldwin’s crucial time living in France), and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, with their own words and Baldwin’s. In fact, Ndegeocello doesn’t appear at all on the longest piece on the album, at more than eight minutes: Jamaican-born Chin’s “Raise the Roof,” a fiery spoken call to rise against the systemic violence that continues to target people of color, set in spare, atmospheric sounds by saxophonist Josh Johnson.
“I think I’m growing and really find that that happens when I surround myself with other people and just be an observer,” she says. “Or I love just being a bass player sometimes. I love just making good coffee for the session.”
She laughs again here, with an air of comfort and confidence, reflecting not just her joy in this particular project, but also the breadth of creativity she is experiencing. Her life seems in full flourish, more than 30 years since she burst forth as a distinct force with her debut album, Plantation Lullabies, one of the first releases on Madonna’s Maverick Records label.
Most notably, perhaps, her 2023 set The Omnichord Real Book won the inaugural Grammy Award for Alternative Jazz album, in many ways standing as a companion to the Baldwin tribute in its affectingly somber textures and refusal to stick to genre lines. Other recent endeavors have included collaborating with the Red Hot Org on the Sun Ra tribute Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City (with Hicks featured) and co-producing young jazz saxophonist-composer Immanuel Wilkins’ expansive, groundbreaking Blues Blood album, which will be released in October. And she’s got a full touring schedule, which included three separate shows at the North Sea Jazz Festival last month, one of them a complete revisit to that debut album, with among others a date Aug. 4 at the Newport Jazz Festival.
The Baldwin stage and album ventures stand in the middle of all this activity, growing organically, the creative group she brought together becoming not just a community, but also a family. You can see that in the intimacy among them shown in a recent NPR Tiny Desk Concert, which includes two songs from Water.
“I love this project. I get to play more bass. I love this project because it showcases such great talent like Justin Hicks. I love this project because Staceyann, that is a voice that penetrates you. It may be hard to hear the truth, but I know she is giving it to you with love.”
With much of the program, Ndegeocello has boosted female perspectives. This was the spark behind “Thus Sayeth the Lorde,” honoring Black feminist poet Audre Lorde, with some parts sung by Miller and others spoken by Chin. It’s a powerful piece in which Chin cites Lorde’s inspiration—“the Lord,” she calls her—for women to speak out though, or because, it “will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt dinner parties.”
“We realized that like all our heroes, [Baldwin] had some missing pieces within his feminism aspect,” she says. “So we were like, ‘Let’s just pay homage and interweave everything. And so we thought about Audre Lorde and the song came about, and Kenita and I took it and just build upon it.”
Ultimately, for all the inspirations and cultural/historical sweep of the project, at root for Ndegeocello, it is deeply personal.
“There’s a lot of theatrics in it,” she says. “It’s emotional. But when I sit with it, I’m left aghast. It just changes my whole perception of myself to being an American of color. So it was a multimedia theater piece. I had sculpture. It was a loose script. Had some dramaturgy. We had a director, Charlotte Brathwaite, amazing. We wanted to use the trope of the church service in ‘The Fire Next Time.’ Baldwin says, ‘I never left the church and it never really left me.’ And that’s how I feel too. I was raised in the church. So we used that trope to bring everyone together.”
Her hopes for the album are just as personal and focused. “All I want from the listening of this record is that maybe you go pick up one of his books,” she says. “It’s a win-win for me. I just want you to have the experience I had and maybe just change a kernel of yourself.”
