Anti -racism – music for Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was rediscovered as one of the most important AFORBERIBERICHER Authors in the course of the Black-Lives-Matter movement. Which does not mean that his texts had ever disappeared completely from the perception. Bassist Meshell Ndegeocello has released an album with “No more Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin” that belongs to the genre of the homage. The texts always refer to Baldwin cited. On the one hand. On the other hand, the music expires more extensively.

“No more water” refers to “The Fire Next Time”, the title of a Baldwin essay band from 1963. Baldwin’s thinking circled, among other things, about the contradictions that arise when white America continuously embarrasses itself on its own humanistic-universal self-image: “I can’t Believe what you say, be see what you do.”

Baldwin has no longer been allowed to experience how much the racist consensus has become porous in recent years, the racist backlash, which was accompanied by the success of the anti -racist struggle. The more porous the once extensive consensus from the late 1960s, the more clearly the historically false. “The delusion and the illusions are falling to the wayside” (the delusion and the illusions fall by the wayside), Meshell Ndegeocello postulated in an interview.

However, the music on “No Mote Water” does not radiate a triumph. “Pain Makes You Humble,” says Justin Hicks in the play “Trouble”. The 17 pieces continue to grab and flow into a musical stream in almost an hour and a half, in which jazz, gospel, sermons in the Spoken word gesture, blues, folk pieces and the tradition of the songs of the slaves that are based on all of the connect. Knocked, primed and supported is all of this by the warm, global bass play Meshell Ndegeocellos.

Paradoxically, the biggest aesthetic force develops the pieces in which the instruments produce fragile: the acoustic guitar piece “The Price of the Ticket” sung by Meshell Ndeegeocello, which tells of the policewoman (»Officer, Officer/I Know You’re Afraid Like Me /But look at my Hands/please don’t shoot me «) or the ambient jazz of» What did i do? «. In contrast, there are pieces that make it clear that certain things will now simply come to an end: “Just be, right here, right now, we can’t loose our way/all my people/struggle starts now, right here today”.

Meshell Ndegeocello produces continuities between the black music of the past and the present. The role of art, music and poetry defines the album in two manifestos, which James Baldwin’s Radioessay from 1962 “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” are taken. He wanted to recommend two options, Baldwin had written-on “No more water” they are new to a Spoken word piece. After that, the poets with whom he means all the artists are “the only people who deep the truth about us/Soldiers Don’t/Statesmen Don’t/Priest Don’t/Union Leaders Don’t/Only the Poets”. The music on “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin” is political music that does not have to fall back on slogans and instead follows its own statements.

Meshell Ndegeocello: »No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin« (Blue Note/Universal Music)