She said we need new myths. Dressed in a simple shiny tunic and talking to us in the tone she'd use to ask if we'd like sugar with that, Meshell Ndegeocello didn't act as if mythmaking would require much strain. Like, new myths are always made from old myths, and there are plenty of those lying around.
The '90s' most distinctive soul revivalist also wanted to talk about race, hear poems about race, listen to recordings of speeches about race, pass around a basket for some worthy charity, jam with her band, sing a little. Hang out. That seemed like a good idea.
The band started with a humorous polka vamp before drifting into the camel stroll of Nina Simone's "Four Women," a song about slaves from MN's 2012 Simone tribute. MN breathed with the languid sensuality that Ms. Simone could tap, but with an effortless omnipresence like air: "My back is strong, strong enough to take the pain" -- oxygen and muscle, a natural disopposition.
Sometimes MN plucked riffs on her big white Fender bass; sometimes she just sang or talked. "Free Will," "Kind of a hippie song," oozed a reverberative '70s soul-blues feel. "Politics, it's not my thing," she claimed, and by politics she meant politicians.
MN's cool understatement was matched by her band's. Jeff Parker seems to be showing up with his guitar most everywhere, and with good reason -- MN said she wanted him in her band just so she could watch him up close. I couldn't see, but what I thought were gauzy washes of keyboard must have been Parker through effects boxes. His solos and obbligatos, though spare, defied their tonal context so consistently that he could play both groover and anarchist, just the combination a modern artist needs. He also formed a creative alliance with co-guitarist Benji Lysaght -- Parker's unbalanced lines and clean tone contrasting in frequent direct interplay with Lysaght's melodic sensibility and rich sustain.
Abe Rounds slapped his skins with quiet insistence, and a co-bassist whose name I didn't catch dropped in his pockety thump when MN felt like unharnessing. A kicky riff popped up. Ndegeocello exhaled, "I'm talking, talking in my sleep" (as apt a self-observation as you could want). And we soon felt Sly & the Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" emerging from whorls of electric texture. "Time is passing, I grow older, things are happening fast / All I have to hold on to is a simple song at last." A song and a community, which Ms. N seems able to raise up wherever she goes. As she explained at the beginning, she has exchanged the old N word for a new one: Neighbor.
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Oft-published poet Morgan Parker got up and read a few times throughout the 90-minute-plus set. Despite a twitchy demeanor and a tinny speaking voice, she came off as most likable, and I kept writing down her often funny and perceptive lines, some of which I reproduce inaccurately below.
I color green because green is the color of power
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I say, "Oh my God," and I am speaking for myself.
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I was meant to stay hungry, to lick my own wounds.
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We have sacrificed all the beauty of our lives.
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Keep a corkscrew in your purse. Don't smile unless you want to.
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I apologize to my parents for the last 30 years. And for the next 30.
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I may get turned on in hiding.
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I have several psychiatrists.
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When I'm rich, I'll still be black.
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I've been thinking of buying a gun.