MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO
Presents The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance Of The Infidel
Universal Music Jazz France
· A step back from the spotlight to make low-light music.
If you stumbled across a song from bassist-singer-rapper Meshell Ndegeocello’s latest recording you likely wouldn’t know that the lady of the shaven head was involved at all. None of her distinctive vocals are on Dance Of The Infidel – she only plays bass on four of the eight tracks (and contributes programming on two others) – and we don’t even see her hard-to-miss name that often. That could partly be because she’s adopted the moniker Meshell Suhaila Bashir Shakur (remember: she was born Mary Johnson), but I suspect it’s more because she’s taken a facilitator role on this album. Instead of standing centre stage, she’s composing, arranging and producing, leaving most of the performing to the fine musicians she’s gathered in The Spirit Music Jamia – names like Cassandra Wilson, Don Byron and Jack De Johnette turn up in the liner notes. The results are by turns mellow, smooth, beat-driven and bluesy – good for rainy nights, before sleep catches up with you.
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