The daughter of a jazz saxophonist, Michelle Johnson first played professionally at 17, when her father's bassist didn't show up for a gig. Around that time, she changed the spelling of her first name, adopted the surname Ndegeocello (Swahili for "free like a bird"), and began listening to a wide range of funk, jazz, and other styles of music. She became a fixture in the nightclubs of Washington, D.C. On the strength of her 1993 Grammy-nominated first album, PLANTATION LULLABIES, for Madonna's Maverick Records, she became an icon of a new movement dubbed "neo-soul," a blend of funk and jazz elements with a nascent hip-hop sound. Her profile grew through the 1990s, even as she explored racial issues and sexual politics through her lyrics.

Last year, Ndegeocello's relationship with Maverick disintegrated. "They wouldn't let me do the things I wanted to do most of all - wouldn't let me grow in the ways I wanted to grow," she says by phone from her home near San Francisco. "Really, there was an existential crisis that I had begun to go through, and I knew that I needed to get away from singing."

Maverick expected Ndegeocello to continue singing. And no one at the label was interested - as Ndegeocello was - in seeing what a bunch of great jazz musicians could do with little cells of melody and not much else. "I realized that no one really has that much to say," she explains. "I wanted the effect of my music to be left up to people's imaginations. I wanted to affect them more with my vibrations than with my words."

That change had been brewing almost from the start of Ndegeocello's career. For a 1997 JAZZIZ cover story, she told saxophonist and guest interviewer Joshua Redman: "Meshell Ndegeocello is dead. Musically, I just want to create a cocoon, go inside of it, and create something new. I want to help other people make music. I think I would be very good at it." She spoke of herself as a Rudy Van Gelder for a new age, of her desire to make jazz recordings, and of her interest in working with a young saxophonist named Ron Blake.

Ndegeocello's life as a pop star, neo-soul pioneer, and controversial lyricist hasn't quite ended. She still sings on tour, treating some shows as pop concerts and others as jazz gigs. But her relationship with Maverick is through. And she's emerged with an improvised jazz album on which she plays bass but doesn't sing a word. Eight years after her interview with Redman, Ndegeocello has created her cocoon and filled it with the freest thinking jazz musicians she could find. Open the jewel case of her new recording, DANCE OF THE INFIDEL, and you'll find the image of a butterfly imprinted on the disc inside.

DANCE OF THE INFIDEL features great jazz improvisers - clarinetist Don Byron, trumpeter Wallace Roney, and saxophonist Lake, among others - and several of Ndegeocello's longtime musical associates, such as drummer Gene Lake (another son of Oliver's). On some tracks, Ndegeocello plays bass; on others Matthew Garrison - the son of John Coltrane's favored bassist, Jimmy Garrison - anchors the rhythm section. There are three vocal tracks: a simple and tender ballad performed by Cassandra Wilson, a straightforward blues sung by Lalah Hathaway, and a sublime, unclassifiable tune that showcases a fascinating singer named Sabina. Still, the focus is on instrumental brilliance and on the way the musicians build Ndegeocello's simple cells into complex organisms.

"I want to be a writer," Ndegeocello says, "who creates these little things that allows these incredible musicians to see where they can go - to give them a matrix or a seed." For most of the tracks, Ndegeocello provided just a melody, a bassline, and a harmonic center. In some cases, she sent recorded sketches to musicians and asked them to compose melodies. For "Luqman," which was inspired by African chants, Ndegeocello sent her ideas to both Lake and Byron. The resulting track blends melodies that both musicians brought to the sessions.

Oliver Lake's sons drew him into Ndegeocello's circle. He was immediately impressed with Ndegeocello's strength in forming and holding a groove on bass. And he was surprised to find that Ndegeocello was a fan of his late-'70s recording, Heavy Spirits. "In some ways, her music is an extension of the sort of feeling we had around that time," he says. "It's structured, but it sounds free."

Bob Power, who co-produced DANCE OF THE INFIDEL, says, "I might call this music 'Weather Report for the new millennium,' hearkening back to albums like I Sing the Body Electric and Mysterious Traveller. And specifically, I mean that the rhythm tracks are more of a continuum. It's almost like a train traveling on the tracks and, every once in a while, you look to the side and you see a scene or a vignette that comes into focus and fades away. And then you'll see another one."

Bassist Garrison plays a key role, sometimes holding down the groove and other times improvising while Ndegeocello plays a bassline. "I've been on too many dates with killer musicians where things are so locked down, so scripted, that the music ends up flat," says Garrison. "Guys like me live for dates like Meshell's." Specific rhythmic ideas lent a progressive edge to the proceedings, he adds. "She has a thing where she takes overlapping beats, with one more relaxed and one more in straight time. Those two things are happening simultaneously and overlapping like waves hitting a shoreline."

It's hard not to hear echoes of Miles Davis' later work in DANCE OF THE INFIDEL. Much like Davis did late in his career, Ndegeocello seeks to combine the virtuosity and depth of jazz's legacy with production values linked to more contemporary black-music cultures. You can hear stuttering rim shots of hip-hop, not to mention the bleeding throb of an electric bass placed prominently in the mix. Synthesizers, samples, electric guitars, and basses share equal footing with harmonica, horns, and piano. It's jazz values filtered through contemporary pop sonics.

Ndegeocello finally made good on the ambitions she voiced to Joshua Redman eight years ago - right down to producing an album for Ron Blake. Blake's new Sonic Tonic sounds very different than Ndegeocello's CD but shares much in its approach.

"I'd waited a long time to work with Ron, and I'd be damned if we were going to make just another record," she says. Ndegeocello set out to get under Blake's skin. The process began with Blake making mix-tapes of tunes that appealed to him. Some of them - like Johnny Griffin's "Dance of Passion" - stayed; others served as springboards for Blake's original compositions.

Blake found the experience invigorating. "Meshell lives in a world of music, as opposed to a world of a particular genre," he says. "Instead of thinking, Okay, this song should have a bass solo or a piano solo, she'd ask, 'What are they going to solo over and why do we have to repeat this same form?' She was saying, 'You don't have to stick with that anymore. You've done that.' And that's why I ended up writing a lot of music that sounds entirely new."

"I hope people get it," Ndegeocello says about Blake's disc. "It's sensual music. It's ghetto, it's island, it's raw. You can't call it jazz. Actually, I hope they don't call it anything."

Ndegeocello wonders if her own new album, which people should call jazz, "will brand her as an infidel - an interloper to jazz's sacred circle and a faithless pop-music defector. She feels threatened by the categorical names that sift and separate musical offerings and our allegiances to them. "You know, people cling to those ideas as if they're belief systems," she says. "And if you defy them, you get branded as a traitor, or an infidel."

The title DANCE OF THE INFIDEL acknowledges that syndrome while making a coy nod to Bud Powell's composition of the same name. It's also meant to defuse the term "infidel" in the context of Ndegeocello's adopted Islamic faith, which she wears proudly with song titles drawn from the Koran, such as "Al Falaq 113" and "Luqman."

Instrumental improvisation is both curative and metaphor for her. "That's the thing about jazz melodies. If I play the melody, it's going to be different than if you do. That's religion: We all are trying to play the same melodies, but we have some different interpretations. And that is pretty much life."

—Larry Blumenfeld