Meshell Ndegeocello’s “People’s Playlist” Drifts From Its Own Premise
A promised tribute to Bay Area radio pioneers gives way to a slow, meditative evening that finds its footing only in flashes.
Meshell Ndegeocello and band perform "The People's Playlist" at Miner Auditorium, SFJAZZ Center, May 1, 2026.
Last Friday, Grammy-winning bassist and bandleader Meshell Ndegeocello returned to Miner Auditorium for the debut of The People’s Playlist, a 90-minute multimedia work commissioned for her four-show SFJAZZ residency.
In a soundcheck interview, Ndegeocello explained that the venue had asked for something other than her long-running James Baldwin tribute. “We’ve been playing Baldwin for the last eight years. That’s what’s in our bodies. We’re playing it really well — we’ve toured it through Europe. But then you get asked to do SFJAZZ, and they want a new program. So, after much trial and tribulation and worry, my secret weapon came up: make a playlist. I called it The People’s Playlist.”
She then framed the concept as an homage to Davey D’s long-running Hard Knock Radio program on Berkeley’s KPFA and to a particular Bay Area lineage of free-form FM. “The Bay Area was the first place where a DJ stopped playing what the record companies wanted them to play,” she noted. “This is where that happened. Sly Stone is one of those who played what he wanted. With the songs we’ll play in concert, I’m just trying to bring words about in this time to really make us question the intention of our spirituality.”
It was a strong premise. The show did not deliver it.
The radio tribute was confined to the pre-show walk-in: a barely audible aircheck of Sly Stone on KSOL from the mid-1960s and a pre-recorded spoken-word piece about FM jocks curating their own playlists. Once the lights came down, the conceit was effectively gone. Visuals from Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen — promised as a centerpiece — amounted to time-lapses of flowers opening, drone shots of freeway traffic, and what looked like 8mm home-movie footage. None of it spoke to the original radio concept. None of it spoke to much of anything.
Ndegeocello opened with a moody reading of Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Miner’s 30-foot stage was packed tight with amps, mic stands, music stands, chairs, and bulky instruments — Jake Sherman’s Hammond B-3 chief among them. The instruments faced inward so the band could take cues from Ndegeocello, who played bass from the back line near the center. Lighting stayed dim; orange and purple held the room throughout.
Her core band included multidisciplinary artist Justin Hicks, who sang and triggered pre-recorded sound effects and speech excerpts, and drummer Abe Rounds, who at points took her bass across his lap and kept time on kick and hi-hat while she stepped away. There was craft on stage. The musicians were never the problem.
The problem was tempo and the absence of arc. Instead of pop-style showmanship — or any clear alternative — Ndegeocello leaned hard into meditative, slowed-down readings that drained the songs of their purpose. Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” turned inward to the point of stalling. War’s “The World Is a Ghetto” arrived lackluster, its funk weight bled out. About 20 minutes in, she addressed the audience for the first time — not to frame the evening or its theme, but to thank the room for providing them with a livelihood. It was gracious. It was also the moment when clearer stagecraft would have re-anchored the show.
The most upbeat stretch was a clever remake of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go,” capped by an effects-driven guitar solo that briefly brought the room up. Introducing “Fellowship,” Ndegeocello mentioned a friend named Jackie who used to bring back cassettes of London radio shows featuring British dub poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson. It was the only time in the entire show that the word radio was mentioned again.
Josh Lane. Photo: Steve Roby
Midway through the set, Ndegeocello handed the spotlight to Sacramento-raised guitarist and Thee Sacred Souls singer Josh Lane for four edgy protest songs. “I’ve been writing little songs on Instagram about the bullshit we’re going through in this country,” Lane told the crowd, his voice slightly nervous. With encouragement from the band, he tuned his acoustic, false-started a couple of times, and admitted this was only the second time he’d played these songs outside his bedroom. The audience met him generously. It was the liveliest the room felt all night, which is its own verdict on the rest of the program.
Returning for the final song of the main set, Ndegeocello quoted a powerful passage from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and folded it into “Trouble,” from her 2024 album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.
After a brief pause, the band came back for a two-song encore she described as songs that make you feel something different than what you think you know: John Lennon’s “Imagine,” followed by Bernard Ighner’s “Everything Must Change,” the piece made canonical by Quincy Jones. Hicks took the lead vocal. Ndegeocello removed her hat, lay flat on the stage floor, then rose to invite audience members up. Roughly 20 took her up on it.
By the end, the show’s stated theme — a tribute to Bay Area radio and the DJs who refused the corporate playlist — had quietly evaporated. What replaced it was a more honest, if narrower, project: Ndegeocello’s stated hope to question the intention of our spirituality. That impulse came through. It came through in a room that had been promised something else, at tempos that gave the audience little to push against, and with a multimedia component that contributed almost nothing. The applause was involved, adoring, and on cue, meeting the artist where she is rather than where she said she’d be.
Ndegeocello is a major artist with little to prove. The People’s Playlist, as part of her show residency, was not the show she described in advance. It is the show she chose to present. The two are not the same.
Program Notes
Artist: Meshell Ndegeocello
Guest musician: Josh Lane
Event: A Love Letter to the Bay Area: The People's Playlist
Date: Friday, May 1, 2026
Showtime: 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Miner Auditorium
Location: San Francisco
Personnel: Meshell Ndegeocello, bass, vocals; Chris Bruce, guitar; Jake Sherman, keyboards, piano, vocals; Abe Rounds, bass, drums, vocals; Justin Hicks, vocals; Josh Lane, vocals, electric and acoustic guitar.
Ndegeocello set: “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” “The World Is a Ghetto,” “Oysters,” “Entertainment Value,” “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go,” “Fellowship,” “Devil’s Pie”
Josh Lane set: “Ice Will Melt,” “Media Is a Lie,” “Martyr Song,” “Pleasure”
Ndegeocello set: Medley: Excerpt from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, “Trouble”
Encore: “Imagine,” “Everything Must Change”
