Ndegéocello

The Magic City is the third album in the Red Hot & Ra series. This entire album was imagined, produced & curated by Meshell Ndegeocello. The album is a features Marshall Allen, Immanuel Wilkins, Deantoni Parks, Pink Siifu, Stuart Bogie and Justin Hicks. It is a dreamlike strange & soulful interpretation of Sun Ra's composition, This record follows Ndegeocello's 2023 album The Omnichord Real Book, named the #1 jazz album of the year by NPR and nominated for Best Alternative Jazz Grammy.

Mercurial and masterful, Meshell Ndegeocello has survived the best and worst of what a career in music has to offer. She has eschewed genre for originality, celebrity for longevity, and musicals trends for musical truths. She has lived through the boom and bust of the industry and emerged just as she entered – unequivocally herself. Fans have come to expect the unexpected from Meshell, and faithfully followed her on sojourns into soul, spoken word, R&B, jazz, hip-hop, rock, all bound by a lyrical, spiritual search for love, justice, respect, resolution, and happiness.

Musically, Ventriloquism has the hallmarks of all of Ndegeocello's work, lush and investigative, subversive and sublime. As always, she pays tribute to her diverse influences and in these eleven covers, we hear them layered over one another. Ndegeocello filters "Tender Love" through a folky, Californian filter and brings Vaudevillian accents to "Sensitivity". She recreates Smooth Operator in five, and turns "Private Dancer" into a sultry waltz. The reimagining affords not just a new musical experience but also a comment on the narrow expectations of sounds and structures for black artists and black music.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2nd Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin pays homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin. Ndegeocello’s transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2nd Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin pays homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin. Ndegeocello’s transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2nd Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin pays homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin. Ndegeocello’s transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2nd Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin pays homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin. Ndegeocello’s transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action.

Acclaimed GRAMMY-winning multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello makes her Blue Note Records debut with 'The Omnichord Real Book', a visionary, expansive, and deeply jazz-influenced album that marks the start of a new chapter in her career.

"All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller" is a collaboration with the vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello that recasts the music of the legendary jazz entertainer Fats Waller as a modern dance party. The album is the studio culmination of a project that was born onstage at Harlem Stage Gatehouse as the Fats Waller Dance Party in 2011 as part of their “Harlem Jazz Shrines” series.

“My whole career, everybody’s been saying my music is meditative,” Robert Glasper tells Apple Music. “People say they study to my music, they pray to my music, they do yoga to my music, they just zone out. People have wanted me to do this for a long time.” The Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer is talking about the direction of his latest album Let Go, a project he created in partnership with Apple Music with the express intention of helping listeners recalibrate mentally.