No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

$30 | 40 | 50  includes $5 per ticket handling fee

Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello pays musical tribute to her literary hero, author James Baldwin, with her latest show, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. The New York Times said it is “an expansive, adventurous piece that turns Baldwin into an organizing principle but also features the thinking of Audre Lorde and calls-to arms from the poet Staceyann Chin that leave a third-degree burn… it’s some of the most hauntingly, melodically beautifully work she’s made —intelligent, sincere, funny, enraged, queer, sexy, intensely pleasing music.”

August 2, 2024 marked the centennial of the birth of James Baldwin, a momentous occasion that is celebrated by the release of one of Ndegeocello’s most intrepid efforts to date. With this new album and concert, Ndegeocello embarks on a prophetic musical odyssey that transcends boundaries and genres, delving headfirst into race, sexuality, religion, and other recurring themes explored in the celebrated writer’s canon. The Wall Street Journal raved “Ms. Ndegeocello’s recorded catalog is too rich and stylistically varied to call any one work her masterpiece. Still, this one qualifies.”

Following 2023’s The Omnichord Real Book, her acclaimed debut for Blue Note Records, which won the inaugural GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Jazz Album, Ndegeocello renders an immersive and palpable document that is as sagacious, unabashed, and introspective as Baldwin was in life. His prescience is alive nearly forty years after his passing, a testament to his enduring impact. A prolific writer, his essays, novels, plays, and poetry have assessed and often reproached the human condition. As an activist, his oratory prowess in the 1960s was bar none, lending his outspoken views on Black oppression with profundity and eloquence.