Trying on an Old Soul With Some Alterations
By NATE CHINEN

MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO is wary of giving the wrong impression with “Pour Une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone” (Naïve), her 10th studio album, due out on Oct. 9. “I don’t want to necromance,” she said recently. “I feel like that’s going on a lot.”

It’s a useful disclaimer given the album’s subject, the mercurial, commanding singer and pianist Nina Simone, who died in 2003 and has since had her music appropriated by ad agencies, club remixers, Kanye West and assorted other cultural properties, including a biopic reported to be starting production soon, with Zoe Saldana in the title role.

Ms. Ndegeocello, a singer-songwriter of searching candor and an electric bassist of mesmerizing skill, decided to make her album after playing a sold-out tribute concert in March, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Plunging into Simone’s legacy — studio recordings, concert footage, a searing memoir and the recent biography “Princess Noire” — she recognized a strain of rage born out of frustration. “I think I can relate a little bit,” she said.

But where the hallmark of Simone’s style was a defiant moral clarity, Ms. Ndegeocello has long centered her own work in a shroud of ambiguity. “I’m really unclear,” she acknowledged. “Emotionally, intellectually, I’m in this place where it’s definitely gray. It’s ethereal.” The difference manifests in her treatment of “Feeling Good,” one of many songs that Simone didn’t write but seemed to own. “It’s such a weird song,” Ms. Ndegeocello said, “and my title should say ‘Feeling Good, question mark.’ I definitely wanted to challenge that optimism.”

Producing the album with her longtime guitarist, Chris Bruce, she placed emphasis on the brooding cohesion of a band that otherwise features Jebin Bruni on keyboards and Deantoni Parks on drums. At her label’s behest she welcomed a small array of guest vocalists, including Toshi Reagon, who demolishes a rave-up version of “House of the Rising Sun”; Sinead O’Connor, who wryly simmers on “Don’t Take All Night”; and Cody Chesnutt, who’s radiantly soulful on “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” For “Be My Husband,” a song whose psychological subtext made it a priority for Ms. Ndegeocello, she used the rustic young folk singer Valerie June.

But the most intriguingly shaded voice on the album belongs to Ms. Ndegeocello, who apprehends Simone’s legacy with curiosity and stubbornness — as well as a keen appreciation of her political stance, what Ms. Ndegeocello called her “blurry sexuality,” her independence as a black woman and her fearsome integrity as an artist. “I mostly wanted to pay tribute to her humanity, her incredible chops as a musician, and her song styling,” she said. “She made them her own and added a quality that can never be reproduced.”