As far as an example, one thing I was reasoning these days is how the social media have prevented us from creating links the one to the other in order to help us express our ideas as we would create them in our brain, while in the real world we were in the past far more careful in order not to hurt our listener or counterpart in a small debate between friends or colleagues or whatever. In a way we passed from focusing on creating a relationship to expressing our ‘true’ self, whatever that fictitious word means.
Or at least, the fact that I could see how my words would change the expression on the face or the energy irradiating from my listener was a great school and also a game changer in my opinions as well. With the raising of the various virtual places in which to tell what we feel to unknown people regardless of how these people would take our words, communication has de-evoluted, just to use a term dear to Mark Mothersbough.
The result is that few persons are able, nowadays, to communicate properly with other human beings. More ore less this is what Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother was telling recently an interviewer from the newspaper The Guardian while affirming that being a poet requires some ability in order to use words. But she has gone further, using the knife of a surgeon as a metaphor for the poethic word. With this metaphor and James Baldwin life on both side of the Atlantic Ocean in mind, I started listening to the Mother last album The Great Bailout.
Obviously when Ayewa uses the metaphor of the knife she is referring to something more complex, as the use of the poethic word as beat poets, and her ancestor Amiri Baraka in particular, did. And, interestingly enough, for some reviewers this output, even if outstanding, is less coming from the heart, so to speak, and coming from the mind. Obviously the reviewer who write such opinion was white, so I asked myself in reading that particular review if it would have sound differently for someone directly involved in the topics depicted by the album. Listening and being empathetic, again.
The Great Bailout deals basically with the money given, after the end of slavery in the U.S., by U.K. government to the old white slave owners. It was not, so, a compensation for the old slaves, but for the old masters. UK inhabitants, and the old inhabitants of colonies in general, have paid this debt for a long, long amount of time. This is not the only measure taken after the end of slavery, obviously: to know more you have to read Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? as an example. Slaves had special laws preventing them to be truly at pair with white folks, basically, and prisons were a modern tool for a new form of social segregation.
But the focus of this album is on the bailout we’ve talked about in the previous paragraph. Moor Mother follows a long poetic tradition in mixing history, politics and visionary images. Plus, this album was before its release toured extensively through the U.S. and Europe, featuring Ayewa with members of the London Contemporary Orchestra. Ayewa and the Orchestra came even in Italy to play this music, as an example in Macao, an ex squatted centre, in 2019.
Even if the album is produced by Moor Mother in first person, every track is coproduced by another artist: as an example, the second track All The Money, full of pointillistic piano voicings, is coproduced by pianist Vijay Iyer. But let’s go back on reviewing all the tracks from the beginning. Guilty opens with the usual small sounds in order to create a reflexive environment for the listener, while the voice of Lonnie Holley and the choruses of Raia Was create the perfect counterpart for it.
Moor Mother rattles off words like “guilty” an asks “did you pay off the trauma” to her listeners while a cello and other orchestrations depict a sonic landscape that suggests compassion and sympathy. All the Money has a more regular but martial rhythms, plus some anguishing lamentations like lyrical choruses, while the video is an assemblage of photographs from the slavery era as you’ll see at the end of this article.
Death by Longitude introduces all the paraphernalia by the Art Ensemble of Chicago while Ayewa’s voice is filtered and effected, and under it at a certain point a grunting (human?) beatbox appears soon turning into a Diamanda Galàs-like vocal experimentation and then suddenly going back to his rhythmic function. My Souls Been Anchored is basically a melancholic violin surrounded for one minute and a half by environmental and orchestra sounds and a blues/gospel voice.
Liverpool Wins is based on electronic noisy sounds over which a texture of female voices creates a support for Moor Mother narration and questions like “How long did it take to pay off the trauma, the madness?” while South Sea, with his nine minutes as the initial Guilty, is another long, sorrowful but also abstract gospel full of small percussions and the Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty creating the perfect landscape for Ayewa’s declamation, leaving space to free jazz horns and an organ in the second part of the track.
The album closes with the one minute Spem in Alium, where various instruments create a musical rug that can be taken as a word of hope as much as an ammission of failure or uncertainty, depending on how you feel, even if ‘spem’ is a Latin word for ‘hope’. In my past overview on Moor Mother’s works I have written that she was completing a path interrupted with the disappearing from the music scenes of Daniel Marcellus Givens and his post-rock-avant-jazz poetry.
In fact, Camae Ayewa is going with her last outputs a step further and a step back at the same time. We’re in a different era, facing different problems. Society has regressed and so the ‘No Visible Colors’ hymn by Givens has left space to a painful reflection on a past whose effect we are able to see in everyday life. Moor Mother is renewing a tradition of civil engagement that, at least right now, can’t face a beautiful or blessing utopia.
Musically speaking, Moor Mother is a step further since all those musical experimentation taken from avant garde jazz, soul, rock and so on are here more organic, there’s less curiosity in how you can make the music of the future sound like but a more focused attempt to describe the present tense. And if in the past someone described Givens’ music as unrealistic, this is a term that nobody would use for Ayewa’s attempts to create art and consciousness.
While I write this review the winds of multiple wars are blowing over our heads and soon someone will try to sell us armed conflicts as the only way to resolve differences between us as human beings. The social media prepared it – if we’re unsatisfied with our identity we buy more – and the politics are trying to capitalize it as much as they can. Moor Mother is such an adequate artist to talk us about our past and, indirectly, about our present.
The album The Great Bailout is packaged into two beautiful images by painter and visual artist Sidney Cain, the front cover dedicated to the slaves coming from the Africa in the U.S. and the back to the slaves’ ancestors. It is the best album I have listened to from the beginning of the year and not only because of the quality of the music, but also for the mood I was still sensible to and how it intertwined with it. Be curious if this music, suggestive as it is, can have the same effect on you.
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