My followers know how much I've appreciated Moor Mother's music since I first listened to her album "Jazz Codes" (Anti-, 2022). I felt a similar intention in her work as I had encountered in Daniel Marcellus Givens' music at the start of the new millennium, and I was excited to hear someone continuing that artistic lineage. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) perform live in Milan, having eagerly anticipated the chance.
Accompanied by a drummer whose jazz background was evident despite the music's departure from classic jazz, Moor Mother introduced the audience to her latest album, "The Great Bailout" (Anti-, 2023), playing only three pieces from that record. The compositions were transformed by new arrangements rooted more in noise and industrial music than jazz. Yet, Moor Mother has reached a point in her career where she can reinterpret pieces like "All The Money" or "God Save The Queen" without seeming derivative, even when compared to artists like Merzbow or Throbbing Gristle.
The live performance, consisting of just 50 minutes of drums played with sticks, electronic devices, small instruments, and Moor Mother's own vocals, was enough to captivate the audience, who showed their appreciation with warm applause at the end. The show began with small electronic sounds and electrified drumsticks, building layer upon layer into an impressive wall of sound. Moor Mother's phrases, such as "how long did it take to pay off the trauma?", echoed with sharpness and precision through the various noise textures, reflecting her time spent with Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as other free jazz collectives like Irreversible Entanglement.
If I had to nominate some of the best musical moments this year, I would include this Moor Mother concert, along with the new albums by Jason Kao Hwang, Fontaines D.C., and Kim Gordon. However, we still have time before looking back and tracing the lines of musical tendencies for the past year. For me, Moor Mother's live performance in Milan's Triennale was the equivalent of last year's intense and bold concert by Michael Gira's Swans. The difference is that Swans are an institution in the post-punk continuum and among the most important founders of no-wave, giving them the freedom to do as they please. In contrast, Moor Mother and her collaborators are only recognized for their artistic value after the performance, which adds an extra layer of courage to their work.
It was 2000 when Age by Daniel Givens came out.
As a newbie of the so-called post-rock movement, and having in my collection of
CDs albums by people like Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, June of ‘44,
Trans Am, Sigur Ròs, Enfance Rouge and Stereolab, and being also interested in
free jazz with the then new reissues of BYG Actuel albums, I hailed that record
by Givens, as some magazines did in my country, as one of the most intriguing
attempts to create a synthesis between many creative rivers.
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.
I had the opportunity to listen to the 2007
release of the latter band, titled Live at Grape Street, and I took note of
that hardcore punk sound sometimes inspired by Rage Against The Machine (Burning
Mississippi, Copspit, Silence), sometimes by Dead Kennedys (Hollywood Meets
Bollywood, Story of Africa, Safety Patrol), playing on full and void dynamics
before the release of all the accumulated tension (40 oz of Hurricane/Pissy
Politician), and with some guitar solos betraying an heavy metal ancestry even
if rehashed (WMD’s).
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).
If The Motionless Present (2017) breaks the
boundaries of noise and hip hop anticipating Moor Mother’s involvement with the
Art Ensemble of Chicago and Irreversible Entanglement, Analog Fluids of Sonic
Black Holes (2019) is the most varied output to that date: arcoes in crescendo
on which Ayewa declames a strange ritual (Repeater), a male and a female voice
mixed together on martial rhythms (Don’t Die), a collage of different voices on
a noise rug and a syncopated rhythm (After Images), a baritonal chant layed
over various effects (Engineered Uncertainty), African-American poet Saul
Williams featured on a trip hop base (The Myth Hold Weight).
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.
Both Black Encyclopedia of the Air (2021) and
Jazz Codes (2022) start with percussions and a subtle melody remembering Daniel
Givens’ past works. Encyclopedia in particularly, less jazz oriented than the
follower, finds his roots in Gil Scott-Heron and in post-rock without being
derivative. It’s a synthesis and a new start. Mangrove and Shekere show a
mature artist, that uses her sound sources in order to express a precise
meaning: it’s not mere experimentation. Cello, rhythm and voice are mixing
together into a unity.
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.
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