‘It is only in music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro has been able to tell his story,” wrote James Baldwin in 1951. Elsewhere, he reflected that no novels, his own included, had managed to rival the bright joy of Louis Armstrong or the sly sorrow of Billie Holiday. Music to him was the highest form of communication – he was friends with Nina Simone and once performed with Ray Charles at Carnegie Hall – and he aspired to translate its emotional force and endless ambiguities as best he could into “the disastrously explicit medium of language”. Watch one of his old interviews or debate performances on YouTube and you can hear his appreciation for the rhythm and melody of words. On the page, too, his finest sentences sing.
It makes sense, then, that Meshell Ndegeocello should work Baldwin’s own words into this album (he has a writing credit on half the tracks), which marks the centenary of his birth in Harlem and takes its title from his 1963 book The Fire Next Time. And it seems likely, given what we know of his record collection, that he would have appreciated the results. Ndegeocello, the singer and bass virtuoso who broke through on Madonna’s Maverick label in the 1990s and has now found an apt home at Blue Note, has pulled off something extraordinary here. Growing out of her 2016 theatre piece Can I Get a Witness?, it’s a shapeshifting dialogue with Baldwin’s life, work and legacy.
One reason why Baldwin, who died in 1987, feels so current is that his arguments sprang directly from his personal experience. He wrote about his struggle to live freely, fully and unapologetically between the bars of racism and homophobia, insisting on his own body as a political battleground. Ndegeocello and her co-producer Chris Bruce shuffle styles and vocalists to represent different strands of the story. Justin Hicks fronts soulful, urgently biographical songs such as Travel and Eyes, while poet Staceyann Chin gives Baldwin’s concerns a stinging update. Ndegeocello herself is the mastermind rather than the main attraction, her voice and fleet, muscular bass-playing diving in and out as required.
No More Water is constructed as four sides of a vinyl double album. Side one paints an introduction to Baldwin with quicksilver funk and gospel. Side two heats up the indignation in the face of judgment and physical threat, hitting a turbulent peak with a knifing yowl of electric guitar on Pride II. Beauty flowers on the third side, with luminescent soul-pop that should appeal to fans of Michael Kiwanuka. “Love takes off the mask that we fear we can’t live without,” chants Hicks on the marvellous Love. The final side loosens up and spreads out in surprising directions, with the ambient soul duet Down at the Cross bearing an unlikely resemblance to the xx.
Ndegeocello plays with the musical touchstones of Baldwin’s heyday – Simone’s stately chords, Marvin Gaye’s sensual ache, the agitated declarations of the Last Poets – without stiffening into historical reenactment. Likewise, the lyrics extend Baldwin’s unflinching scrutiny to present-day America. In a famously tense 1984 conversation, the feminist Audre Lorde pulled up Baldwin on his most serious blind spot: gender. Chin goes where he couldn’t on Tsunami Rising, an astonishing monologue that roams from the slave trade to #MeToo, slowly ripened by Josh Johnson’s swelling saxophone. Raise the Roof is a hot blast of rage over the killings that inspired Black Lives Matter, escalating to a staccato battlecry: “Scream, wail, march, meet, gather, plan, strategise.”
On first listen, Chin’s contributions cleave like an axe but it’s the more fluid, open songs that cast a lasting spell and speak to Baldwin’s mercurial, uncontainable quality. He once described language as our imperfect attempt to “get to something which is real and which lives behind the words”. Full of wonderful words though it is, the album ultimately confirms Baldwin’s conviction that nothing is more eloquent about what lives behind them than music.
