Daniel Givens hosted the AACM member Joshua Abrams on bass, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and guitarist Jeff Parker between the many others, creating a music that has one of his peaks and manifestos in the composition titled No Visible Colors, where he recites “No Visible Colors/No Particular Race/No Sign of Borders/No Expiration Date”. If the last affirmation is a sign of Givens idea that art can transcend mortality, the rest of the quote is showing how much this music is behind every conceived boundary.
Unluckily Givens issued only another EP a few times after and another album in 2008, so this idea of ‘popularizing’ hip hop, post-rock, free jazz and the avant-garde creating from them a new form of music has faded without any particular glory, and sadly enough I settled for listening to different genres of music instead of a great, new form of art that was able to mix them together in a unique vision from a single, peculiar artist.
Obviously there are musicians mixing different styles together, as Terrie Ex playing with his punk band and Getatchéw Mekurya or alone with Ab Baars or Paal Nillsen-Love, and what about Tom Waits who mixed songwriting with avant garde sounds for all of his life after 1983? But the idea of people living in a ‘no safe zone’ where you can encounter elements of jazz, of rock, of electronics, of rap, etcetera without any of them as a mainstream or predominant element was still not perfectly embodied by anyone.
This is possibly the reason I reviewed different kind of music on different websites: being a fan of a music that doesn’t exist, I can listen to every other style without being prone to it. But now, after a long period since my last article, I encoutered the music of Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother and finally that particular idea is finally carried up a flag by a relatively new, and great artist. This is the reason I dedicate to her this post on my blog, because the more I listen to her, the more I listen to the music I wanted to hear from the very beginning.
Grown up at Aberdeen, Maryland, Camae Ayewa faced since as a young girl all the difficulties of living in a community taken as second class. She started also listening to various styles of music, including rock, hip hop, ska and jazz. Becoming and adult, she started playing bass in bands like Girls Dressed as Girls and The Mighty Paradocs.
At the end of the 2010s Ayewa started experimenting with a microKORG, a vocoder/synthesizer, and gave life to her new project named Moor Mother Goddess, whose principal elements are electronics and samplings. Since 2012 she started issuing on the internet a hundred recordings, mostly spoken poetries with music – a sample of Fugazi’s Waiting Room stands out between the others. Soon the ‘Goddess’ fell from the name of the project, and Moor Mother issued the single titled Change with Sham-e-Ali Naheem as a guest.
A synthesizer burr and few hits of the keyboards on contemporary electronic rhythms, Ayewa voice is in the foreground while Naheem’s on the background. Moor Mother on that same years got in touch with the Philadelphia underground creative scene, where she planted the seeds of the projects that flourished the following years in Los Angeles, where she started teaching composition at the Southern California’s Thorthon School of Music.
As the collective Black Quantum Futurism raised, with Rasheedah Phillips as major partner-in-crime, the first soloist albums are released initially trough the label Don Giovanni, responsible of all of her efforts until 2021, when she started publishing records with the label ANTI-. Fetish Bones is a 30 minutes album that for its structure is reminiscent more of some Terre Thaemlitz records than of Gill Scott-Heron or Daniel Givens.
The music, introduced by industrial/dubstep/trip hop sounds mixed to spared percussions leaving then space to the voice and sampled horns, is full of disturbing rhythms and free jazz blows, percussions claiming the attention to an inner listening that is heckled by some noise (Creation Myth), paranoid rhythms (KBGK), poems recited on noise bases (Deadbeat Protest), dramatic tensions (Valley of Dry Bones), Tricky’s rememberances (DIY Time Machine), hammering rhythms on distorted melodies (Chain Gang Quantum Blues), martial rhytms with a distorted voice (By The Light), more cinematic moments (Cabrini Green x Natasha McKenna).
Moor Mother starts in that period many collaborations with the likes of flutist Nicole Mitchell and others, giving life with Circuit City (2020) to an opera in four acts. This is the first Moor Mother production I would advice to a listener whose ears are oriented towards free jazz. This ‘cicle of afrofuturist songs for our climate’ is split in four parts and features musicians like Steve Montenegro (electronics), Luke Stewart (upright bass), Keith Neuringen (saxophone and percussions), Tcheser Holmes (drums), Aquiles (trumpet, percussions), Madam Data and Elon Battle.
Working Machine, the first part, remembers some of the Bill Dixon works in which musicians are painting more than playing melodies and rhythms. Circuit Breaker sees Moor Mother declaim on what seems to me as an attempt by the musicians to play without following the one the other – as the Velvet Underground did in the famous film by Andy Warhol or Area, the Italian prog band, did playing with Steve Lacy in 1976. Time of No Time seem to come from Miles Davis and his musicians during the Bitches Brew sessions; and in the end No More Wires is a Coltrane hymn.
The music is consistently different for Moor Mother two last output with ANTI-. First of all, these couple of records seem to be more a synthesis of Camae Ayewa’s music different sources, and they also introduce a new, determinant factor: a good dose of soulqarianism. Do you remember the records J Dilla, The Roots, D’Angelo and Erykah Badu created during the beginning of 2000? Yes, ‘that’ idea of soul and hip hop is the skeleton of a music that in Moor Mother sees influences from free jazz and other musical souces – as we have seen – to rotate around it.
It is something new in the underground world: a musician that takes inspiration on an almost mainstream movement, a little bit of a minority but not a niche, like R’n’B and that shores it up with elements coming from more underground musical languages. Another characteristic of Moor Mother’s music is her style of spoken poetry, her ability, so to speak, to ‘loose herself’ repeating more and more one particular sentence until she feels the music is coming back to her ready to put her on the trails again.
If Moor Mother were a man, for sure this two traits would have been taken as expression of a new language, as something authentically revolutionary, and we would have seen many other poets copying it. In a male dominated world, this will not happen but it is not a bad case since we will be able to appreciate the original instead of the many possible copies. But let’s go back to the music.
Obsidian is dominated by a limping rhythm that creep into effected voices, as in the following Iso Fonk accompanied by liquid keyboards. Rogue Waves sees a use of scat that is almost lettrist, Made a Circle is almost chill out, Tarot is an attempt to create a groove with words instead than with a rhythmic. And if Zami with his noise and spoken poetry fusion remember the past output of the artist, in other places of the album the trip hop tension is decisely transposing itself into analogic percussions.
Jazz Codes, nominated by some music magazines and critics as the most interesting output of 2022, is, as we said before, following Encyclopedia’s tendency lines adding to it the jazz flavour that the many collaborations that Moor Mother is accumulating in that field, as we have seen. In particular Ode to Mary sees pianist Jason Moran in a dialogue with Ayewa’s words, in the track titled Woody Shaw spoken poetry and rap are mixed with the keyboards pointillism, and Meditation Rag is a come back to a recitation mixed with the horns and with a lyric chant.
But if the album is varied, at a point that it is useless to describe every single track, the use of featurings and of different musical sources, from sampling to real instruments, is at the service of songwriting, a songwriting that it is pure and intense as we didn’t hope to find out since many years. Since Jazz Codes close with a precise speech, in which it is said that the word ‘jazz’ was a term indicating ‘sex’ at the beginning, which is, being at ease with yourself and being natural, we will close this monography remembering to our listeners that listening to music is a particular process.
Art is, as Moor Mother pointed out in many interviews, a mean to be taken into another world. In this other world we can see ourselves complete as we would love to be. This is why is so important to be in a place that didn’t existed before also musically, as I explained at the beginning of this post. Musicians like Moor Mother and Daniel Givens before her gave life simply to the dream of every other musician: not only to be original, but also to live through music in a new place. Someone would call this new place utopia. A serious indication where we want to put our feet in the future. Music is an invitation to that. Let’s follow it.
