Meshell Ndegeocello is set to release her latest CD, Dance of the Infidels, on June 21 on Shanachie. The album features a variety of guest artist, including Cassandra Wilson, the Brazilian Girls’ Sabina, Kenny Garrett, Roy Hargrove and Jack DeJohnette.
Fusing together elements from funk, R&B, jazz, soul and reggae, Dance of the Infidels uses instrumental pieces over vocals, with only three exceptions: “The Chosen” with Wilson, “Aquarium” with Sabina (which she also cowrote) and “When Did You Leave Heaven?” with Lalah Hathaway.
“Right now, I have nothing [verbally] to say… What I feel I can express a lot better in instrumental music,” Ndegeocello said in a previous JazzTimes article.
Ndegeocello released her first album in 1993 and scored a hit a year later with “If That Was Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” That same year, she also performed bass and vocals with John Mellencamp on his Dance Naked album, which contained the hit song “Wild Night.”
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes