The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams

by Thom JurekSay what you will about bassist, songwriter, singer, bandleader, and arranger Me'Shell Ndegéocello, any box you attempt to put her into is not possibly big enough to hold her creativity and restless, unwieldy aesthetic vision. On "The Sloganeer: Paradise," a tune in which she equates the bland, complicit nature of blindly living modern life with committing suicide, she sings: "To know me is to know I love with/My imagination." It's a summation of her entire career thus far, and this album furthers that notion exponentially. The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams is Ndegéocello's debut for Decca; it is wilder than Cookie: An Anthropological Mixtape, or her last recording, The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel. The latter set was a project that indulged her love of postmodern jazz and engaged in improvisation. She directed an ensemble that included Oliver Lake, Don Byron, Jack DeJohnette, Kenny Garrett, Ron Blake, Brandon Ross, Lalah Hathaway, Cassandra Wilson, and others. It walked a line between tight song-oriented material and longer jam-based tunes, and she didn't really sing on it. That's remedied here, and her sultry, smoky voice is heard on virtually every cut. Musically, this albums walks through walls. There are funky soul tunes whose backdrops are full of psychedelic music that would make the latter-day Jimi Hendrix smile in delight (think the material from Cry of Love). There are jazz-oriented tunes that slip toward pop, folk, and whole-tone folk songs. The lyrical content engages spiritual concerns and carnal love more often than not in the same song. And while she once more employs a wildly diverse collection of collaborators that include everyone from Ross and Lake to Pat Metheny, Oumou Sangare, Robert Glasper, Mike Severson, Daniel Jones, Doyle Bramhall, David Gilmore (not the one from Pink Floyd), James Newton, and Graham Haynes, she also cut two songs ("Evolution" and the bonus cut "Soul Spaceship"), playing all the instruments herself. So what does it sound like? The future arriving fully formed on the doorstep. It opens provocatively enough with noted American Muslim teacher and Islamic scholar Shiek Hamza Yusuf reciting the predictions of Mohammed to a backwash of Ross' guitar and ambient sounds. (Yusuf was the man who appeared with George W. Bush after 9/11 and denounced the attacks and all religious violence, and is working for a return to Islamic sciences as well as assisting Western governments in understanding Islamic culture and Muslims.) It moves into a rock & roll dreamscape called "Sloganeering: Paradise" awash in keyboards, a drummer playing drum and bass breaks ... Read More...