A belated Baldwin birthday bash. After being rained out on August 2—the proper centennial of the outspoken author and activist James Baldwin—the release concert for Meshell Ndegeocello’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (CD, LP, download from Blue Note Records) in the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! concert series was rescheduled for August 14. As it happens, that night was the birthday of writer and critic Hilton Als, one of the many voices heard on the remarkable record. Ndegeocello’s voice is also heard, of course, as well as her bass and her vision; she co-wrote and co-produced the 12 original songs and settings of Baldwin’s texts, as well as one from self-described “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde. But perhaps the most striking voice on the album is that of poet/performance artist Staceyann Chin, who was exponentially more fired up in performance than on the album. With the encouragement of an Prospect Park audience, Chin was every bit as incendiary as Nina Simone reading the poem “Are You Ready” by David Nelson aka Dahveed Ben Israel (an early member of the Last Poets) in the documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Ndegeocello actually mentioned her love for the 2021 film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival during the concert. Later, she said “We’re kind of getting numb, you see, and that makes me nervous,” and it was a frightening reminder of how fragile progress can be.
Ndegeocello was neither front nor center at the Lena Horne Bandshell. Most of the time, she sat with the band and singers, all dressed in white robes (Chin’s with the sleeves cut off and “VOTE—FIRE DIS TIME” scrawled across the back). The concert was about the songs, hot and cool, and the message was the medium. There’s a laid-back but emphatic groove to Ndegeocello’s music, reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield and appropriate to the calm, provocative prose of Baldwin. “Trouble,” the album’s standout track, is a bittersweet groove featuring the angelic voice of Justin Hicks. The one-two punch of “Love” and “Hatred” come off like an early Funkadelic ballad with the four voices in full choral mode followed by guitar-and-organ-driven deep truths. It’s an album of deep reckoning and live, it was certainly one of the most powerful gatherings on Brooklyn/Lenape soil of the season.
A singer for all folk. In 2017, Willie Watson released a wonderful pair of albums—Folk Singer volumes 1 and 2—that included tasteful arrangements of traditional songs and familiar tunes credited to Lead Belly, Furry Lewis, Utah Phillips and others. Watson uses the term “folk” in an older, more egalitarian sense, the sense in which (for example) Chess Records could release a series of compilation albums by John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and others called “The Real Folk Blues” and it not be seen as a contradiction. Folk music from when it was music for the people, not a West Village café concoction. A founding member of the Old Crow Medicine Show, Watson has worked with John Prine and Gillian Welch and, with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins, recorded the version of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” that the song always deserved. The self-titled Willie Watson (CD, LP and download out Sept. 13 via Little Operation Records) is the folk singer’s first under his name since those 2017 volumes and his first album of original songs.
There’s more than a little Yusuf Islam (known in his heyday as “Cat Stevens”) at play on Watson’s new record, not just in his slightly nasal, vibrato-heavy warble but also in the long, gentle melodies he writes. With sparse band accompaniment and his own guitar and banjo, the songs are easy-going but not simple, neither in music nor meaning. “Sad Song” contains some deft finger-picking against the meter which could wash right over you if you’re not paying attention. And “Slim and the Devil” was written in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, NC, that left one person dead and 35 injured and inspired then President Donald Trump’s response that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Watson turned to Sterling Brown’s 1933 poem “Slim Greer in Hell” and adapted it, keeping Satan’s appearance as a sheriff and Slim’s mistaking the southern states for hell. He retells the story, making it his own with a reverence for the past, in time-honored folk singer tradition.
A warm wind blown up from Hades… or Athens, maybe, but really Hades, is what seems to be the suggestion of Condescending (cassette, CD, double LP, download out from Hypaethral Records/These Hands Melt last month), the debut album from the massively sludgy, Greek funeral doom band Föhn. Their name actually refers to a southerly wind warming a mountainside, a massive phenomenon that the four quarter-hour songs on the album conjure quite convincingly. The tempo is bone-grindingly slow, the vocals are gruff and buried, and the production is fantastic. (The album was mixed and mastered by Esoteric vocalist Greg Chandler.) The core trio of vocalist Nikolaos Vlachakis, bassist Georgios Miliaras and taskmaster Georgios Schoinianakis, who provides drums, guitars, keyboards, and programming, is augmented on some tracks by a second singer and two (two!) saxophones howling through the din like the ghosts of children. Condescending might be a bit of typical fare in the world of monolithic metal, but it’s expertly done, with admirable restraint, always going for less where a lesser band might try for more. And while death, futility and nothingness are the subject matter for the first three songs, the 17-minute closer, “Persona,” addresses human trafficking, forced prostitution and slavery head on, opening with clean guitars and a clear, documentary-style woman’s voice. It’s a bold move and a bold band, and likely one of the heavy releases of the year.
