(Blue Note)
Baldwin’s stinging words on race and America are matched with the kind of musical eloquence that the great writer himself so admired
‘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.
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