Meshell Ndegeocello

Meshell Ndegeocello (real name Mary Johnson) was born in 1969, the daughter of an American soldier - also a saxophonist - stationed in Germany. In the early 90's she was noticed and signed to Madonna's Maverick label. Plantation Lullabies, her first recording (1993, with Geri Allen, Wah Wah Watson, Dave Fiuczynski and Joshua Redman), revealed a bold new female artist to the public. Her frank attitude to her work confronted her audience with her deep vocal timbre, her raw texts that broached subjects that in 1990s America were still being avoided in mainstream music (sex, politics and race discrimination), and her original music that mixed funk's energy with a freedom borrowed from jazz and folk. The album Peace Beyond Passion followed in 1996, and then the extremely intimate Bitter in 1999.

In 2002 the album Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape was released, a percussive album where its texts were concerned (the superb ‘Dead Nigga Blvd’, borrowed from a poetic dimension similar to Angela Davis and Gil Scott-Heron), and also an album with more radical grooves (Marcus Miller, Gene Lake, Sean Rickman). More recently, Ndegeocello has been involved in the film that portrayed the Motown label at the height of its fame (the multi-award winning Standing in the Shadows of Motown), and also a documentary on the go-go music scene in her hometown Washington. In 2007 Ndegeocello released The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams to critical acclaim. Ndegeocello has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards.