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

Meshell Ndegeocello, bass and vocals
Abraham Rounds, drums
Jebin Bruni, keyboards
Jake Sherman, organ
Christopher Bruce, guitar

Note: All personnel except Meshell Ndegeocello subject to change.

The closing performance in our 2024-2025 jazz series finds yet another groundbreaking and expansive composer and bandleader leading a centennial tribute to an artist, scholar, and activist who found a home at UMass.

Meshell Ndegeocello is known as a virtuoso of the electric bass, and as a songwriter and arranger whose work spans multiple genres. She is a thirteen-time Grammy nominee, and three-time Grammy winner. Her first album for the iconic Blue Note label, The Omnichord Real Book (2023), took the first-ever Grammy for Best Alternative Jazz Album. The critically acclaimed Omnichord found Ndegeocello creating at the intersection of jazz, R&B, funk, soul and other genres developed by Black American artists.

Ndegocello notched her second consecutive Best Alternative Jazz Album Grammy with her second Blue Note release, 2024’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. A breathtakingly powerful record, No More Water marries Ndegeocello's expansive vision of jazz with the words and ideas of the writer, orator, philosopher, and civil rights activist.

Baldwin, whose prose, poems, plays, and essays dealt with themes of gay rights as well as with race and class, came to UMass late in life via a 1983 appointment as Distinguished Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities. Baldwin taught as a member of the faculty of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and across the Five Colleges.

No More Water is nothing short of a stunning artistic achievement. It's a record that owes as much musically to Maceo Parker, Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins as it does to Charles Mingus and Alice Coltrane. Lyrically, its great debt is to Baldwin. But there's more than that. Gil Scott-Heron is there. And the Last Poets. And Curtis Mayfield. And Meshell Ndegeocello, of course. The composer and bandleader opens her heart and her soul to the listener, revealing the currency and immediacy of Baldwin's thoughts and words by connecting them with her own experience nearly four decades after Baldwin's death. No More Water is powerful and painful. It is liturgical, venerable, and beautiful. It is raw, aching, and emotional. ... It is important. It is vital. It is breathtaking.

The press has taken notice of No More Water as well. And the notice the record has received is impressive.
Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin review – a fire reignited, Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian
Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead, Wesley Morris, The New York Times

Join us for another fantastic evening of music in celebration of a remarkable life.