On Meshell Ndegeocello and Artistic Curiosity

I recently reconnected with one of my earliest teachers and mentors in London, Geoff Gascoyne. Google him—he’s had an incredible career, and he set me up with some invaluable information at the beginning of mine. I was a guest on his podcast, The Quartet, and so many amazing memories about my very first days of becoming a bass player came flooding back.

One of the most important lessons I learned, just weeks after picking up my first bass, was also something that wouldn’t come into focus for some years—and it’s something I think we all deal with as fans of music.

We all have our favorite artists and favorite albums or periods of output from our heroes. It’s one of the major considerations that factors into whether we’ll go that extra step and buy a new recording or a concert ticket. Geoff knew I wanted to be a jazz musician and recommended some incredible albums like Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter, and Soul Station by Hank Mobley. But in that very same lesson, he threw another name into the mix: Meshell Ndegeocello.

I fell in love with her albums Peace Beyond Passion and Plantation Lullabies, and her playing on those records has shaped my foundation as a bass player more than any other artist I’ve ever listened to. Both came out in the early and mid ’90s, when I was doing nothing but listening to and playing bass every day. They were the soundtrack of a very formative time in my life, and as such, my attachment to the music was intense.

Fast forward a decade to the mid 2000s: I’m living in New York, even playing on the same bill as her. Through my initial disappointment that she didn’t play any of those songs I loved so much as a kid, I started to understand something incredibly important about what it is to be an artist.

She was playing for herself in the studio. She was making music that mattered to her and not following a tried-and-tested formula of copying the albums that made her successful early on. It would have been so easy to make variations of Plantation Lullabies and be known for a specific thing for the rest of her career. But despite the massive success of Peace Beyond Passion, which was her second album, she followed it up with Bitter: acoustic guitars, strings, and big, open-sounding drums. A complete—and very brave—left turn.