Bass Love

Somewhere on the internet you can find a photograph of Meshell Ndegeocello sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Meshell Ndegeocello is a band.” The doubled meaning is perhaps obvious enough: She is herself a musical outfit and she and her collaborators embody collectively the spirit of that invented Swahili surname: free like a bird. Ndegeocello’s most recent albums, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (2024), Red Hot + Ra: The Magic City (2024), and The Omnichord Real Book (2023), exemplify the T-shirt’s claim and, perhaps, add a new valence to the name: “Meshell Ndegeocello” now signifies, like “Duke Ellington” (her Washington, DC, musical forefather), artistic genius and excellence.

I began listening to Meshell in the fall of 1993 when her first album, Plantation Lullabies, debuted. Whenever I hear that record’s second track, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” I fall into its “ungraspable resonance.” That’s Katherine McKittrick’s phrase for the rebellious feeling and political action of making, taking in, or grooving to the “waveforms” underwriting Black music. Defining this idea in her book Dear Science and Other Stories, McKittrick imagines groove, heard or embodied, as a song’s “theoretical frame.” Think of James Jamerson’s bass play on Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover”: It isn’t simply a wonder of chromaticism, it’s a rhythmic disquisition on bottom tones, romanticism, Blackness, being, and love.

Ndegeocello sets up two opposing visions of Black American life in the opening verses of “I’m Diggin’ You”: the first, a soulful celebration of Black love and consciousness; the second, a scene suffused with crack addiction and police violence. She pushes the song through this tension with a release line: “Beautiful brown bodies / Pimp, switch, and sway.” The line offers a new, third vision: It returns listeners to the play and freedom of Black communal affinity in verse one, and its syllabic bounce resounds as a burbling, slithering musical groove. When sung aloud, it sustains in the inner ear; as a mantra or a line of strong imagist poetry, it’s immediate and contemporary.

The line is also a transport channel, what poet Ross Gay calls a “black umbilicus of genius”; the lyric collapses or rewinds elapsed time, placing me in the moment I first understood it. I was probably bicycling to basketball practice or posting up in the south lounge of the student union the first time I realized that the “Beautiful brown bodies” were pimping and switching to the song Ndegeocello interpolates in the first verse: “The brothers were singin’ / ‘Ain’t no woman like the one I got.’” Ndegeocello’s citation of The Four Tops’ “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got)” is even more dazzling now because I can hear Wilton Felder, whose bass play anchors the original studio recording, as the pulsing antecedent of the groove she created to undergird “I’m Diggin’ You.”

I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in summer 1992, between my sophomore and junior years. The book was my entrance into Black American writing and thought. During the subsequent school year, I would tuck myself away in private campus nooks and take up books such as Beloved, Invisible Man, Black Boy, The Salt Eaters, Damballah, and Middle Passage. Though all these works offered different pictures of American life, they conceive of the power central to Black experience similarly. Baldwin calls it a “sensual force” in The Fire Next Time. “To be sensual,” he writes, “is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” Rather than bringing to mind “quivering dusky maidens or priapic Black studs,” this notion of sensuality is an assertion of one’s earthly, generative presence in every human action, including creating art. Maybe this explains the allure of “I’m Diggin’ You”: The sensual force of Ndegeocello’s groove places listeners among those “Beautiful brown bodies” enacting radical Black life and art.

Thirty years later, in early December 2023, I traveled to Brooklyn to catch Ndegeocello performing as the closing act of an afternoon-long symposium celebrating the Hilton Als–edited volume God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin (2023). Before the Brooklyn Museum event, I had lunch with my homeboy Gillespie, at Tom’s Restaurant on Washington Avenue. As we’d been doing for the preceding decade whenever we found ourselves in the same place at the same time, we shared a delicious meal while bantering about movies, music, and visual art. On that late fall midday, however, Gillespie also steered our conversation into the middle age whirligig: troublesome personal health, aging and declining parents, sibling trouble, and professional disappointment. Over home fries and eggs over-easy, we watched ourselves spinning away.

Earlier in 2023, Ndegeocello had released her thirteenth studio album, The Omnichord Real Book. It’s a meditation on spiritual stillness amid adulthood’s tempestuous churn. The album’s first three tracks are prayers or stability practices. “Georgia Ave” opens in chant—“Wake up, return, balance, align”—and closes in ethereal, lyrical hope—“Learning to dream better.” “An Invitation” is an emergency call to the host on high: “I’ve been shaken / I fear I’ve lost my way / Speak, I’ll listen I want to / hear every word you say / When my mind’s on you / I (I) / feel such peace inside.” “Call the Tune” is a one-line circular breathing exercise: “Everything is under control.”

Leaving Tom’s, Gillespie and I could hear the “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza” rally well before we traversed the three blocks between the diner and Eastern Parkway, the thoroughfare fronting the museum. Cops and parked patrol cars—their red and white roof lights twirling—hemmed the crowd’s edges, corralling it. We made our way to the building entrance, wading through the billowing mélange of kaffiyehs and banners of red, black, white, and green—an overlay of the colors of the Palestinian and Pan-African flags. With Baldwin’s notion of witnessing on my mind, I paused for a few beats among the marshalled thinking about our era of mass protestation: for the Earth’s health, for Standing Rock, for Black Lives, for Dreamers, for Palestine, against illegal invasion and war, against political and capitalist corruption, against genocide. The street scene and the about-to-begin Baldwin celebration were sensually bound.

Ndegeocello draws from that force to create her art. Recalling my first listening to her music, during the fall semester of my senior year at university, I wanted a sensual life but didn’t know how to be present in my own body. I can only generate now a fragmented, nostalgic, impression of myself then. After a stumbling start to college life, I’d gained balance, momentum, and speed studying African American film, music, and literature. My daily equipment for living included a portable compact-disc player; a pair of over-the-ear studio headphones; a Schwinn mountain bike; and a messenger bag with room enough for pencils, notebooks, two or three paperback novels, a few CDs, and a half-gallon lidded mug for hot coffee in the mornings and iced coffee to push through late-night study sessions.

That same fall, I was listening to soul, hip-hop, and jazz, and reading arts criticism without satiation. I took John McCluskey’s course on the contemporary African American novel; his syllabus required reading Ishmael Reed, Gayl Jones, and David Bradley, among several other novelists. On October 7, 1993, the morning we began discussing Toni Morrison’s Jazz, McCluskey opened the meeting with news that the Swedish Academy had just awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though I’d been reading Morrison for a few semesters by then, the sensation of pride and amazement drove me to devour the whole of Jazz that night. The novel taught me the requirements of Black adulthood: maturity plus incisive, critical intelligence (with a refined blend of irony, humor, compassion, and composure under pressure), not entitlement or childish complaining. Some of the music and criticism I moved through in 1993 amplified Morrison’s instruction—whether vibing to, say, Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light ’til Dawn or Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), or reading Margo Jefferson’s cultural criticism in The New York Times—I was learning that adulthood meant balancing responsibility for my own well-being and freedom with loving obligation to my family and ethical and political allegiance to global movements against colonialism, especially the movements of the African diaspora.

Out of all that brilliance, it was the rigorous funk of Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies that dropped me into the deepest groove of African American cultural practices—the Black bottom: Rumbling up from the Earth’s core, it loosens the plantar fascia, rises to roil the hips, bubbles the guts, triggers the funky butt, lodges in the chest, adding percussive ripples among the heart’s up-and-down, in-and-out, right-and-left ventricular chugging. Once I felt it, that propulsive movement became central to the self I was shaping, the Blackness I’d just begun to name and inhabit. Coming of age in the same cultural moment (she was born 1968, and I was born 1972), Ndegeocello’s been my constant guide; since ’93 her music has translated and described my own unarticulated feelings.

The Omnichord Real Book is Ndegeocello’s first album for Blue Note Records. At Thalia Hall, in Pilsen, a neighborhood in lower-west-central Chicago, on the evening of Omnichord’s release, June 16, 2023, I witnessed Meshell Ndegeocello performing in support of their new release. Strangely, however, they didn’t open the show with a track from the new LP.  They began with a cut from Ventriloquism (2018): a counter-genre, space-clearing rendition of “Atomic Dog.” On that record, the band country-fries George Clinton’s funk anthem. Bramhall’s twangy entrance on electric guitar sparks the melody, and the group—Chris Bruce (acoustic guitar), Abraham Rounds (drums), and Ndegeocello (bass)—follows that lead into an elongated vamp. They could have ventured toward a jammy, Cherry Garcia kind of interpretation, but instead the band makes it a blues stomp.

Live at Thalia Hall, the players (minus Bramhall) seemed to reflect the recording’s line of development until Jebin Bruni (keyboards, programmed beats, and effects) played a riff that cued Justin Hicks (backing vocals) to ululate something approximating melody. Hicks’s wandering line steered the other musicians toward unknown coordinates: an open, broad, loose rhythmic terrain. Singing the recognizable opening verse and chorus in unison, the group created an even wider sonic opening. There, Bruce laid out a guitar solo dressed in the shaggiest Jimi Hendrix–like reverb. The band intimated linear musical structures only to groove listeners into the abstract geometries of their group play.

More than a cover artist, Ndegeocello is a translator, an exquisite recomposer. Listen to her dynamic reconstruction of Whodini’s “Friends” on Comet, Come to Me (2014); The Soul Children’s “Don’t Take My Kindness for Weakness” on Weather (2011); Ready for the World’s “Love You Down” on The Devil’s Halo (2009); Funkadelic’s “Better by the Pound” on the vastly underrated Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002); Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” on her masterpiece, Bitter (1999); Marvin Gaye’s “Make Me Wanna Holler”; and Bill Withers’s “Who Is He and What Is He to You” on the near-masterpiece Peace Beyond Passion (1996). Ndegeocello liquefies these gold bricks and recasts them as majestic R&B/soul/funk sound sculptures.

Take Ndegeocello’s recording of Samora Pinderhughes’s “Gatsby.” Rather than the anxious, warbling search for identity that Pinderhughes delivered in 2019 on his original version, Ndegeocello takes a reflexive, angular approach to the lyric, achieving a tone of assured self-critique, as though F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character had made it to middle age. On his recording, Pinderhughes plays up the gap between the persona’s performance of bonhomie and his acidic self-interrogation by double tracking the vocals and stacking them to create dissonance. There is sonic logic and narrative intelligence in that choice: Jay Gatsby is, after all, a young romantic, a fool for love trying to hustle fate.

On the other hand, Ndegeocello’s spacey, spacious arrangement of “Gatsby” relies on backing vocals from Joan as Police Woman (Joan Wasser) and Cory Henry’s piano accompaniment to evoke an attitude of retrospection, honest confession, self-forgiveness, and grace born of age and wisdom. This middle-aged “Gatsby” reminds me of a Richard Pryor riff on foolishness and age (dude had deep, intimate knowledge about tempting fate): “You don’t get to be old bein’ no fool. Lot of young wise men, they deader than a motherfucker, ain’t they?” Ndegeocello translates this tart, ironic knowledge into a tonic on “Gatsby.” The track exemplifies her tussling with aesthetic refinement and mortal finality throughout The Omnichord Real Book. As she does on “Gatsby,” Ndegeocello’s translations defamiliarize overmined pop music territories, plowing new grooves to reveal unexplored emotional complexities.

Every song cover is not a translation. When an artist can veer away from faithful recitation, quotation, citation, or reference toward transformative sonic or lyrical versioning, then, perhaps, something novel can emerge. Translation is a way of expressing the improvised self and muting that self-composition while simultaneously speaking through another or others. The ventriloquist both lets the song say what it must and manipulates it. Practicing the art of musical translation, Ndegeocello remolds music history in her image.

In the liner notes for Ventriloquism, she acknowledges that albums can take up personal pain or political protest, or chart musical journeys, “shape-shifting soundmaking, a new way to do an old thing.” The album was recorded and released during “times so extreme and overwhelming”—the period after her father’s passing and during the opening twenty-four months of Donald Trump’s first administration—and the music reflects Ndegeocello’s desire to “take refuge in a process, a ritual, something familiar, the shape and sound of which recall another time altogether.” Translating 1980s pop and R&B numbers allowed Ndegeocello to “weather the present.” Her “Black experimental musicking,” as Jonathan Leal describes such art, creates escape hatches to an elsewhere in which new futures can be improvised.

In the middle of Ventriloquism, looking back to fashion a time ahead, Ndegeocello translates three consecutive songs written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Perhaps the most luscious of the tracks is her take on “Sensitivity,” a hit single for Ralph Tresvant in 1990. Ndegeocello reconfigures this mid-tempo, new jack soul man come-on into a tambourining, New Orleans second line palimpsest of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five and the Hot Club jazz of Django Reinhardt.

Even more fascinating, as she frequently does when taking on songs written by or for men directed toward a female beloved, Ndegeocello doesn’t reorient the protagonist’s gender on “Sensitivity.” She occupies the space that Jack Halberstam has called the female masculine. Evolving, shifting, female masculinity is “a porous limit of gender variance; an alternative edge to manhood, and a historical trajectory that extends back beyond modern sexual and gender definitions.” The female masculine evades, like ungraspable resonance, literal translation. It’s a recomposition. Ndegeocello’s translation of “Sensitivity” speaks across time to my eighteen-year-old self, offering that kid “an alternative edge to manhood,” another world, an elsewhere that makes him the man of his dreams.

Since my teens, the people who’ve been closest to me, best friends and lovers, have thought of me as either an overwrought romantic or an unfeeling rationalist. My college girlfriend, CMK, once accused me of loving books more than I loved her. She was only partially incorrect. Apparently, I’m neither very good at loving in a grounded, unidealized manner nor am I adept at expressing serious, thoughtful, deeply felt affection. My oscillation probably comes from not knowing how to love well, choosing my lovers poorly, and getting burned from those bad habits. There’s a through line of defensiveness on both fronts. I’ve given away a lot of life force trying to prove my love a worthy gift and myself as worthy of loving.

I learned about love in the 1980s, listening to pop music on the radio and watching romantic comedies at the movies, sitcoms and music videos on TV. That miseducation made me a fool. Already lovesick and jaded when I started college in August 1990, the Quiet Storm jams and pop lullabies for the unrequited became templates for dreaming up scenes of undergrad love on the quad. Many nights that fall and in subsequent semesters, I spent more time spitting lines to PYTs—“Can I talk to you, I really wanna know you”; “I will never do anything to hurt you”; “Whip all of your sweet, sad loving on me”—than I did prepping for my French course or studying The Odyssey.

What my late-adolescent self didn’t know then was that the songwriters, singers, screenwriters, and directors weren’t teaching me how to love. They were teaching me to long for idealized fictions about love. The music—I mean the whole vast array of pop and R&B balladry—taught me how to front, how to perform a hunger for intimacy, a willingness to change my ways, and a beseeching genuflection before the beloved. Playing the lover was like lip-syncing or singing karaoke. I understand now that when I was learning to cover those love songs, I should’ve been learning how to transpose those fictions into emotional truths.

Born to Congolese immigrant parents who spoke to me in Tshiluba, French, Lingala, and English, it occurs to me now that there might have been profound lessons I misinterpreted living among those languages. I grew up in Indiana in the 1970s and ’80s, outside of Black American experience, local and national. Though they couldn’t take me and my brothers to (what was then still) Zaïre, they socialized us in African familial and cultural circumstances. I wasn’t learning Black American history at school and wasn’t living through it at home, but I picked up bits of culture from classmates and some strands of history from books and television. Back then, because the lives of Americans and African immigrants overlapped in only the most forced social circumstances, rarely privately, even my highly educated, worldly parents used me, their firstborn child, as a kind of translator—speaking both directions at once—between their household and Hoosierland.

Lacking knowledge of American Blackness as a nine-year-old was fairly unproblematic. However, as an eighteen-year-old, my ignorance about Black experience posed sociopolitical problems. Learning Blackness wasn’t about acquiring a special racial intelligence or essence. Rather, I had to source its languages, practices, and histories for information that might aid my surviving in the US. I had to understand how others would racialize me, receive or misperceive me, as I moved around in a six-foot-tall, dark-brown-skinned male body. I had to learn how to think and move through life as though wrong moves in wrong places at inopportune moments could be deadly. It’s an ongoing education in analysis, interpretation, and meaningful, intelligent reaction, i.e., the arts of criticism and translation.

Etymologically, “Walton” comes from Old English: wald (a wood) or walh (a farm worker; genitive plural wala) or walesc (foreigner) + tn (town or hamlet or farm)—English wooded fortress, wooden enclosure, or farmstead or village of the Britons. My Tshiluba second name, “Mulombu,” comes from Mulombodi, meaning “someone who guides, directs, or influences others within a group, organization, or community.” Until recently, I’ve not used my middle name. Since childhood, others have mispronounced that name, mangling or butchering it with sniggering derision. Instead of the name, I’ve let an initial hold middle. That M’s deep nexus looks like an inverted truss, a joint where things merge in rhythm and balance, creating strength through tension. The M inverts but mirrors the W, both have stems—fortress-like walls—which frame gathering points and protected enclosures. Perhaps I am both someone walled off, enclosed, and someone who can draw others together. Maybe this is the thing I’ve been meaning to translate all along: An elliptical practice of describing the thorny, paradoxical, contrapuntal Blackness I inhabit. Mulombu is a fulcrum, a joint, or hinge between my parents’ Francophone names (my mother, Valentine; my father, François), between Muyumba and Walton, the DRC and the US, bringing them together, enclosing them.

Late in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes a political conception of love he understood as crucial to the civil rights revolution: “Love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” This sense of love is not the amorous, personal thing; it’s a private, individual attitude and a fraternal, civic arrangement. Baldwin argued that Americans could only achieve democracy through a critical interrogation of both the nation’s bloody, racist history and our individual, private selves. First doubting, then eschewing the false narratives of the nation’s innocence, and our own, we might develop instead the private maturity and civic love necessary for forming a demos charged with sensual force. I’m writing myself into and out of Ndegeocello’s music searching for access to that sensuality, a power, harmonically stacked but threaded through with dissonance: love in freedom, freedom in love.

Gathered in the Brooklyn Museum’s auditorium, an excited audience took in two panels of poets, curators, scholars, visual artists, critics, and filmmakers thinking aloud together about Baldwin’s influence and legacy. After a lengthy intermission for book signing, snacks, and sundowners, we returned to our seats for Ndegeocello’s punctuating statement. First, Chris Bruce (guitar) and Jake Sherman (organ) walked on stage and took their appointed spots. Then, seat lights dimmed, the stage bathed in purple gloaming, Ndegeocello and her other bandmates strode from the back of the room, down the right aisle, and up onto the stage, soul-clapping, tambourine-rattling, and vamp-chanting in unison.

As they mounted the steps to the stage, Hicks sang out, “Turn to the heart,” over the top of his chanting bandmates thrice; each time, he ran the phrase along different channels of melisma, prompting the group’s pivot toward the song’s foundational lyric. Positioned across the stage, prepared to deliver the good word, they flipped that chant into refrain, calling out to the audience:

love takes off the mask
that we fear
we can’t live without . . . (x4)
And we know
we can’t live within.

Then, Bruce and Sherman entered the play, picking out the melody and plugging in the underlying harmonies while Ndegeocello, electric bass now strapped in place, marked the deep tones of the chord changes, embellishing both the established rhythm and the developing melodic line. Singing solo, Hicks first lined out the verse; then, in fine two-part harmony, he and Kenita Miller-Hicks charged the chorus.

On No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, the song that opened the Brooklyn Museum set is titled “Love.” Its engine is a swampy Meters-like gospel-funk that Ndegeocello (bass guitar), Sherman (key bass and Hammond B-3), and Abe Rounds (drums and percussion) have designed to support the group’s choral harmonizing (Miller-Hicks, Rounds, Hicks, and Ndegeocello) as they deliver the chorus:

To live in love is to be uncertain
To live in love is to bear the burden
Of so many who yearn to know,
My life matters . . .

Drawing from his oeuvre to improvise and refine lyrics, Meshell Ndegeocello then performs those songs using an array of global Black musical modes to pay homage to Baldwin. Initially crafted and mounted as a group-performance piece in 2016, on record, No More Water becomes a suite, a four-movement operatic disquisition on the philosophical and spiritual succor that twenty-first-century people can find in Baldwin’s works.

As with her other large ensemble albums (The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel and Pour une âme souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone), Ndegeocello cedes the central musical and vocal labor to her collaborators; here, she crafts and shapes the tracks around the poet and performance artist Staceyann Chin and the lush and nimble voices of Hicks, Miller-Hicks, and Rounds. Chin’s serrated poetics sharpen the album: She seethes with righteous indignation and passionate Black love whether delivering her own poems, citing lines and ideas from Audre Lorde’s poems and essays, or reading from Baldwin’s essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”

On No More Water, we mostly hear Ndegeocello as a member of the band on backing vocals and bass. And yet, her grooves, her concentric frequencies of vibration, simultaneously direct the band and open nodal spaces where listeners—their manifold nerve endings buzzing electrically—enter unbounded, ungraspable Blackness. Her subterranean undulations provoke us to braid together “neurological pleasure and the melodic pronouncement” of Black experience: an ever-improvised, ever-evolving knowledge of life and the embodied practice of freedom in love, love in freedom. Ndegeocello’s prestidigital bass play manipulates space and time in ever-funkier patterns. When she does take or share the lead vocal—on the stunning coffeehouse protest song “Price of the Ticket”; the gorgeous, moody funk track “Trouble”; or the stark, closing number “Down at the Cross”—her vocal approach and delivery suggests sober meditation: peace beyond passion. On No More Water, “Meshell Ndegeocello” names both a central atomic element in contemporary global Black art and an expansive approach to Black being that resists essentialism.

Ndegeocello can pull off “Love” because of the emotional and psychological effort she’s already described on Omnichord, especially its seventh track, “ASR.” For practicing Muslims, Asr is the middle prayer, the third salah. It’s a congregational call and response. When the imam announces the takbīr, the supplicants answer in kind: Allahu akbar. Asr is a ritual of realignment. In the context of the album, “ASR” acknowledges that the changing, aging midlife body requires significantly more spirit-mind-body alignment and maintenance, more prayerful contemplation in order to love exuberantly, create powerfully, labor efficiently, or merely live in health. When any part atrophies, the other parts also weaken, no longer able to overcompensate as in youth.

On the album, Ndegeocello places “ASR” in the middle of a sequence that describes a process of enlightenment that begins with striving for or awakening in lucidity (“Clear Water”); resetting, adjusting, and healing the heart (“ASR”); reconciliation with the self (“Gatsby”); embracing earthly impermanence (“Towers”); and ends in a statement of heightened awareness: “Don’t let the outside world / distract you from your inner world” (“Perceptions”). Arranged as a nearly eight-minute, three-section epic, “ASR” concludes with a daring solo from guest guitarist Jeff Parker. A contemporary master from Chicago’s creative-music tradition, Parker improvises a complete musical idea in only fifty seconds. Galloping atop Ndegeocello’s shuddering bass line (the sixth different rhythm pattern she generates within the composition), Parker improvises for three choruses. At the top of his second turn, Parker quotes the fanfare from “Acknowledgement,” the first stanza of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965), one of the greatest sacred compositions and recordings ever made. Parker’s gesture links the structure and meaning of Ndegeocello’s composition to Coltrane’s suite. “ASR” declares that patient, devotional heart-healing is the highest form of love.

During the slimmed-down Brooklyn performance (without Rounds or keyboardist Jebin Bruni), the band unwound “Love,” rearranged and reshaped it, beginning in the refrain to emphasize the song’s central challenge. Watching the band (in another variation, with Rounds and Aaron Miles, a second bassist, joining in) perform “Love” during a set on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, you can hear Ndegeocello rendering Baldwin’s theory (“Love takes off the masks”) as mantric haiku: a provocative, exuberant, three-minute-and-forty-two-second praise song, a spiritual.You might also imagine their tightly situated gospel group play as the embodiment of the very thing Baldwin hoped we might have the grace and wisdom to create as a country.

This Baldwinian-thought-made-Ndegeocellian-translation joins soul song and poem. “Poetry is the most subversive use of language there is,” explains Audre Lorde, “because it attempts to bring about change by altering people’s emotions.” While the poet moves individuals toward emotional openness and self-interrogation, the soul singer—an artistic mode forged in the civil rights revolution–invests “group resilience with spiritual meaning,” writes Emily Lordi. The revolutionary soul singer charges listeners to think, keep on pushing, stand, dance in the streets, and fight the power.

Gillespie didn’t stay for the abbreviated set. He’d seen the full performance before. So, he dipped out, returning to his family life. His lunchtime stories remained, however, encircling me, blending with the songs of protest and love. Like Ndegeocello, he and I are now facing—if we are both so lucky—the very long, very strange middle decades of our lives when losses become larger, more visceral and final, and gains arrive, not in the furious flashiness of youth, but from the slow, incremental adjustment and refinement of established grooves.