Ndegeocello

Meshell Ndegeocello is spearheading the next installment in the ongoing Sun Ra tribute series, Red Hot + Ra, with the LP Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City, out April 12. The LP isn’t a traditional “tribute” album filled with covers. Rather, Ndegeocello and her numerous collaborators honored Sun Ra with totally new compositions that used the intergalactic jazz giant’s ideas, words, and melodies.  The first offering from the album, “#9 Venus the Living Myth,” incorporates elements from Sun Ra’s “Rocket Number 9”…

Meshell Ndegeocello may have helped to kickstart the neo-soul movement in the 1990s, which introduced the world to D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, but to call her a soul singer would undermine her tastes, which are as wide as her discography is long. Speaking to me via a video call from her Brooklyn studio, where she dons all-black clothing against a backdrop of synthesisers and electronic rigs, Ndegeocello namechecks a cavalcade of faves: Broadway musicals, the classic sci-fi film Soylent Green, cult rapper Pink Siifu and…

Over the past 30 years, German-born American bassist and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello has lent her unique blend of spacious melodies, rooted grooves and intricate fingerpicking to tracks by everyone from Madonna to Herbie Hancock and Robert Glasper. Across her own albums, Ndegeocello has been honing this sound to create soulful music that interpolates R&B and hip-hop as much as the virtuosity of jazz. Most recently she produced 2018’s Ventriloquism, which reinterpreted R&B tracks from the 80s. On her latest album…