Missing Maestra: Meshell Ndegeocello’s We Insist!

Abstract

Missing MaestraMeshell Ndegeocello’s We Insist! Shana L. Redmond and Robeson C. Haley-Redmond In a normative world, a performer’s introductory question of “How’s everyone tonight?” is unremarkable and one that even when genuine rarely engenders a response It’s a call to order more polite than “Hey,” more graceful than “Let’s start.” But if taken seriously it is also an invitation, a way into a performance that acknowledges that the goings-on on stage are only part of the event. Under the conditions of the global COVID-19 pandemic and in a season of unrelenting anti-Black, transphobic, antiwoman violence in the streets and at all levels of legislature, Meshell Ndegeocello’s greeting hit differently. Offered in her distinct register, “How’s everyone tonight?” was a kind gesture and greeting and, when paired with a noticeable pause, previewed the possibility of not only witness but also a broad exchange that would invite more than those in the room into the conversation. This possibility was already present—was anticipated, in fact—well before anyone entered the venue or, in my case, logged onto the livestream. Ndegeocello was in residency at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side, and this night’s event was titled “Meshell Ndegeocello: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Inspired by and curated in dense entanglement with the 1960 album and legacy of the intrepid drummer-composer-bandleader Max Roach and his ensemble, including the powerhouse vocalist Abbey Lincoln, Ndegeocello’s evening was saturated with expectation, not only for Roach and Lincoln but, low-key, for the other Lincoln too. Roach and musician-composer-writer Oscar Brown Jr. began composition of We Insist! in anticipation of the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Though too often narrowly routed through Abraham Lincoln, emancipation was the doing of a variously scaled rebellion and “general strike” of the enslaved, and it is they who haunted the Ndegeocello performance during Black History Month 2022.1 [End Page 99] Roach and Brown’s take on the promise of freedom was far more critical than celebratory. Freedom Now staged the moment of its release as a reckoning with the unfulfilled mission of the Proclamation and was an amplifier for the movements that insisted on their due rights, right now. Four years later Nina Simone continued to put pressure on the established civil rights time line in “Mississippi Goddam” when she ventriloquized white society as continually saying, “Go slow.” Her retort: “But that’s just the trouble. / Too slow!” The lethargy of progress, if ever one believed in such a thing, quickly gave way to doubt and, eventually, resignation to the fact that the failure to achieve justice was not a matter of excessive time but limited will. Black people could simply not expect equal protection in this country or world (as decolonization movements everywhere documented). The civil rights legislation of 1964 was a start rather than an end to a project of racial parity, and the generations of Black people that followed lived the realities of ongoing unfreedom as the state opened its newly integrated palm in demonstration of “no tricks up my sleeve” with one hand while continuing to choke the very life from Black communities with the other. Ndegeocello explained that her selection of We Insist! as centerpiece was prompted by the fact that she continues to return to the album. With political conditions such as they are, perhaps the sounds’ recurrence is a return without a change in direction—she didn’t go back so much as continue in conversation and travel with the music, such as one might do in stepping off of and onto a moving walkway: same direction, different speed. In her ongoing dialogue with the five-part masterpiece, Ndegeocello also negotiates her relationship to the performative practices of Roach’s middle-century moment. The release of We Insist! coincided with a performative innovation in U.S. popular culture: the reenactment. Both civil war centennials and “instant replay” on television were new technologies of knowing the past that, as Tracy McMullen argues, allowed its participants “to play again.”2 In some respects, that is precisely what Ndegeocello did during...