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Hmm. Ominchord. What’s that, I wonder? Just a minute, while I look it up …

… Well, as far as I can make out, it’s the electronic equivalent of the autoharp. It was invented by the Suzuki Musical Instrument Corporation in 1981 and was in production throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A new version is due to be formally announced at the Winter NAMM show in Los Angeles on 25th January, with a release date later this year.

OK. So why did the bass player, vocalist, songwriter and producer, Meshell Ndegeocello, call her latest album The Omnichord Real Book? Because she used an omnichord to help her compose her original songs, and constructed the album like the Real Book collection of lead sheets for jazz standards that her dad gave her when she was just a child.

And, there’s the first hint of the music genre on this album. It’s jazz, of sorts. But it’s just as much soul and funk and hip-hop. If you imagine Herbie Hancock, Gorillaz and Chaka Kahn on stage together, you will glimpse a flavour of this double LP.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s artist page on Spotify mentions connections with: Madonna, The Rolling Stones, David Torn, Gil Scott-Heron, Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, Sinéad O’Connor and many artists unfamiliar to Old Man Crotchety. On her 13 albums to date, she has covered songs by: Bill Withers; Jimi Hendrix; Radiohead; Earth, Wind & Fire; Leonard Cohen; Nina Simone; and Prince. The breadth of her taste is mind-blowing. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, she straddles the full width of the harbour that encompasses modern beat-driven music.

She does it supremely well, too. Ms Ndegeocello has been nominated for no less than eleven Grammys and, in collaboration with Robert Glasper and Gabriella Wilson, she won the Best R&B Song award in 2021 for Better Than I Imagined. And yet, her name had escaped the sensors of the Crotchety Detection Apparatus until just the other week. Spotify is fully justified, I think, in describing her as “an unassuming colossus”.

Having decoded ‘omnichord’, the cryptanalysts at Crotchety H.Q. went on to examine the artist’s name. ‘Meshell’, they tell us, is just an unusual spelling of her birth name, ‘Michelle’. ‘Ndegeocello’ comes from the Swahili, ‘ndege ocello’, which means “free like a bird”. It’s a statement of her determination to rise above the obvious stereotypes: black, female, bisexual; to be seen, first and foremost, as a musician. Daniel Felthensal provides a deeper insight in this article from The Guardian.

The Omnichord Real Book is not a book. Nor is it a series of omnichord solo performances. But there’s nothing fake about the 18 music tracks it contains. They are all 24-carat gold.