This August marks the centenary of James Baldwin, whose blistering invective against US racism still resonates. And to this resonance, the legendary bassist Meshell Ndegeocello responds. Released on what would be Baldwin’s 100th birthday, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin is an homage to Baldwin as much as a statement that we need him now more than ever. The gospel that the title is a reference to the transcendent spirit that Baldwin embodied, which is why No More Water is not, for Ndegeocello, an exercise in the simple setting of pre-existent texts as much as it the generation of new ones: speak up, speak out, hold yourselves in a community, this album seems to say.

But this radicalism has been characteristic of Ndegeocello’s work, from her music with the Red Hot organization, focusing on HIV-AIDS to her exploration of racism on her debut album Plantation Lullabies (1993). This Grammy-winning musician, characterized by an intuitive and supple figuring and the source of the new soul genre, is in reflective mood here. So often the songs – ‘What Did I Do?’ or ‘The Price of a Ticket’, for example, are subtle, understated affairs – guitars, keyboards, sax and percussion from Chris Bruce, Justin Hicks, Abe Rounds, Jake Sherman, Jebin Bruni, and – Julius Rodriguez – and de-fined by cracking vocals from Ndegeocello and Kenita Miller, among others. Not surpris-ingly, there’s an emphasis on spoken word, and here the performance poet Staceyann Chin turns it up to eleven. Declaiming her poem, ‘Raise the Roof’, she insists that we must find the voice of resistance for ourselves because, ‘we are never, ever going away’.