Meshell Ndegeocello – No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Meshell Ndegeocello – No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:32 minutes | 1,51 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Blue Note Records

Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2nd Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin pays homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin. Ndegeocello’s transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action. The album will be released on Baldwin’s Centennial: August 2, 2024. Co-produced by Meshell and guitarist Chris Bruce, the album also features frequent collaborators Justin Hicks, Kenita Miller, Abe Rounds, Jake Sherman, Jebin Bruni, and Julius Rodriguez, as well as powerful spoken word performances by Jamaican poet and activist Staceyann Chin.While Meshell Ndegeocello started work on her expansive James Baldwin tribute No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin in 2016, the finished album comes in 2024, three months after her Sun Ra tribute Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City. The two albums capture some unifying qualities of her talent and process, while serving in other ways as polar opposites. Both live through the impressive technical skill of Ndegeocello and key collaborators like guitarist Christopher Bruce, keyboardist Jebin Bruni, and vocalist Justin Hicks—with this proficiency always serving the music without drawing focus to virtuosity—and relies on her ability to juxtapose and integrate styles to create songs both familiar and new.

The differences in the projects reflect Ndegeocello’s ability to build albums around unifying themes, and starkly contrasting ones. Celebrating a canonical author, No More Water foregrounds words and their delivery. In the album’s most extreme manifestation, poet and activist Staceyann Chin delivers her own words, and Baldwin’s, in a direct, spoken style, sometimes with little or even no musical accompaniment. No More Water emphasizes crispness and clarity, like the prominent, hip-hop-influenced beat on “Pride I,” which provides both structure and propulsion.

“Baldwin Manifesto”s I and II set Baldwin’s lyrics to simple backgrounds, while other tracks like “Eyes” and “Hatred” integrate his words. In contrast, Chin provides contemporary social commentary, with obvious roots in Baldwin’s thinking about race and gender, on “Raise the Roof” and “Tsunami Rising.” In songs like “What Did I Do?” and “Another Country,” Ndegeocello’s lyrics explore Baldwin’s life and philosophies in ways more referential than literal.

In his liner notes, Pulitzer Prize-winning academic Hilton Als summarizes the album perfectly: “the music you hear in No More Water is Jimmy talking to Meshell and his words meeting the language of her sounds and then coming out again through a multitude of voices, a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen.” – Steve Silverstein

Tracklist:

1-01. Meshell Ndegeocello – Travel (04:09)
1-02. Meshell Ndegeocello – On The Mountain (05:59)
1-03. Meshell Ndegeocello – Baldwin Manifesto I (00:43)
1-04. Meshell Ndegeocello – Raise The Roof (05:06)
1-05. Meshell Ndegeocello – The Price Of The Ticket (01:34)
1-06. Meshell Ndegeocello – What Did I Do? (05:18)
1-07. Meshell Ndegeocello – Pride I (02:54)
1-08. Meshell Ndegeocello – Pride II (02:38)
1-09. Meshell Ndegeocello – Eyes (05:17)
1-10. Meshell Ndegeocello – Trouble (07:18)
1-11. Meshell Ndegeocello – Thus Sayeth The Lorde (05:40)
1-12. Meshell Ndegeocello – Love (03:42)
1-13. Meshell Ndegeocello – Hatred (05:28)
1-14. Meshell Ndegeocello – Tsunami Rising (08:04)
1-15. Meshell Ndegeocello – Another Country (04:47)
1-16. Meshell Ndegeocello – Baldwin Manifesto II (02:06)
1-17. Meshell Ndegeocello – Down At The Cross (05:42)

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