Meshell Ndegeocello's Synonym: All-Star Covers from Dylan to J-Lo

Meshell Ndegeocello's new album Synonym, released on Blue Note, is a collection of cover versions rendered as duets, drawing on songs by artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Jennifer Lopez, the Human League, Barbra Streisand and Temple of the Dog, Chris Cornell's short-lived grunge supergroup.

The record's guest list matches the breadth of its source material. Chaka Khan, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Callahan, Cat Power and jazz pianist Robert Glasper all duet with Ndegeocello across the album.

The Guardian's review frames Synonym as part of a career defined by refusal to stay in one place. Since her 1993 debut album Plantation Lullabies helped spark the neo soul genre, Ndegeocello has worked in jazz, R&B, alternative rock, reggae, fusion and gospel. The album has been described as an "expression of queer liberation." Blue Note is the label behind the release.

Her previous album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, pushed classification to its limits. The record leapt from Afrobeat funk to electronic abstraction, closing with a track the reviewer compared to the xx. It won the Grammy for best alternative jazz album — an award the Guardian's critic suggests the organisers may have granted in defeat after failing to determine which category the record actually belonged in.

The reviewer argues that even a listener with no knowledge of Ndegeocello's eclectic history could sense her restlessness simply from the back cover of Synonym. The tracklist's scope — from Dylan to J-Lo, from the Human League to Streisand — signals an artist still unwilling to settle.

Synonym arrives as the follow-up to that Grammy-winning Baldwin project, and it suggests Ndegeocello remains most at home in transit between genres, collaborators and repertoires.