Jazz Codes (ANTI-)
Moor Mother
Released July 2022
New York Times 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2022
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2022
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lpJ_Rf2quHFNYDf-iSa5h7-2580yCwcA0
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1KBAi5FZbmygWH3D2EcHCc?si=uRr1fSZ4RLq9Iek-AnLNJQ
About:
“It’s poetry that drives this album – the stories of these artists and countless others not named but felt – is the leading motivation. I wanted to honor & give offerings – hold them in my body dream with them – send sweetness.”
Camae Ayewa
The songwriter, composer, vocalist, poet, and educator Camae Ayewa spent years organizing and performing in Philadelphia’s underground music community before moving to Los Angeles to teach composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. She released her debut album as Moor Mother, Fetish Bones, in 2016, and has since put out an abundance of acclaimed music, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians who share her drive to dig up the untold. She has performed and recorded with the free jazz groups Irreversible Entanglements and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and made records with billy woods, Mental Jewelry, and YATTA.
Coming out on July 1, Jazz Codes is her second and latest album for Anti- and a companion to her celebrated 2021 release Black Encyclopedia of the Air. Jazz Codes uses free jazz as a starting point but the collection continues the recent turn in Moor Mother’s multifaceted catalog toward more melody, more singing voices, more choruses, more complexity. In its warm, densely layered course through jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, and other Black classical traditions, Jazz Codes sets the ear blissfully adrift and unhitches the mind from habit. Through her work, Ayewa illuminates the principles of her multidisciplinary collaborative practice Black Quantum Futurism, a theoretical framework for perceiving and adjusting reality through art, writing, music, and performance, informed by historical Black ontologies.
Jazz Codes sprung from a book of poems by the same name, a collection of poems written in honor of jazz and blues icons like Woody Shaw, Amina Claudine Myers, and Mary Lou Williams. During the pandemic lockdowns of early 2020 Ayewa connected with Swedish producer Olof Melander to see if he would send over a few jazz loops, with the intention of putting together a CD that would accompany the book’s release. Melander sent her about a hundred tracks. The more Ayewa worked with them, the more the project spilled out from itself. Jazz Codes took on its own life; melodies sprouted around Ayewa’s poems. In a shift from the noise-inflected sound of her previous albums, she began writing songs with R&B sweetness, songs that asked for singers to accompany her raps and spoken word transmissions. She sought out a roster of far-flung collaborators to help them bloom.
Working virtually, Ayewa drew in instrumentalists, like flutist Nicole Mitchell and harpist Mary Lattimore, and vocalists, like Melanie Charles and AKAI SOLO, into the album’s growing space. On “ODE TO MARY,” Ayewa’s spoken poetry tangles with Orion Sun’s fluttering vocal ad-libs and Jason Moran’s dizzying piano lines. “SO SWEET AMINA” lets Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet cast its glow onto ripples of Wolf Weston’s searching voice. None of Ayewa’s collaborators heard each other’s takes before the songs were completed. She acted as the focusing point among them, finding affinities and synchronicities, braiding disparate pieces together into a reverberating whole. “I’m trying to get rid of people’s timelines, to get rid of people’s doomsday calendars—this speeding through life and reality,” she says.
Track Listing:
1. Umzansi (Moor Mother) featuring Black Quantum Futurism featuring Mary Lattimore 02:40
2. April 7th (Moor Mother) feat. Keir Neuringer 02:09
3. Golden Lady (Moor Mother) feat. Melanie Charles 01:46
4. Joe McPhee Nation Time Intro (Moor Mother) feat. Keir Neuringer 00:55
5. Ode to Mary (Moor Mother) feat. Orion Sun & Jason Moran 02:32
6. Woody Shaw (Moor Mother) feat. Melanie Charles 01:51
7. Meditation Rag (Moor Mother) feat. Aquiles Navarro & Alya Al Sultani 04:31
8. So Sweet Amina (Moor Mother) feat. Justmadnice & Keir Neuringer 03:23
9. Dust Together (Moor Mother) feat. Wolf Weston & Aquiles Navarro 02:26
10. Rap Jasm (Moor Mother) feat. AKAI SOLO & Justmadnice 03:14
11. Blues Away (Moor Mother) feat. Fatboi Sharif 02:48
12. Blame (Moor Mother) feat. Justmadnice 01:38
13. Arms Save (Moor Mother) feat. Nicole Mitchell 04:09
14. Real Trill Hours (Moor Mother) feat. Yung Morpheus 01:36
15. Evening (Moor Mother) feat. Wolf Weston 02:13
16. Barely Woke (Moor Mother) feat. Wolf Weston 02:35
17. Noise Jism (Moor Mother) 01:00
18. Thomas Stanley Jazzcodes Outro (Moor Mother) feat. Irreversible Entanglements & Thomas Stanley 01:47
19. Black Honey (Moor Mother) feat. Loijj & Honeychile 02:57
20. We Got the Jazz (Moor Mother) feat. Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer, Aquiles Navarro 01:53
21. Black Dust Blues (Moor Mother) feat. Elaine Mitchener 03:13
Personnel:
Moor Mother: vocals, electronics
Aquiles Navarro: trumpet (7, 9, 20)
Kyle Kidd: vocals
Alya Al-Sultani: vocals
Dudu Kouate: percussion
Nick Dunston: bass
Tcheser Holmes: voice (11)
Nicole Mitchell: flute (13)
Mary Lattimore: harp (1)
Jason Moran: piano (5)
Keir Neuringer: saxophone (2, 4, 8, 20)
Produced by Moor Mother (tracks 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 13, 17-21) and Olof Melander (1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 13, 18-21)
Engineer: Steven Dewey
Mixing: Willie Green (tracks 1-18) and Joe Baldacci (tracks 19-21)
Mastering: Alex Nagel
Artwork: Anthonu Molden
Executive-Producer: Moor Mother
Review:
Remember those images of stellar nurseries from the James Webb telescope that enchanted the internet last July? They’re what Moor Mother’s new album, Jazz Codes, sounds like. For multihyphenate artist Camae Ayewa’s second album for the Anti- label, she conjures a phantasmagorical index of references from jazz’s past, present, and future.
Like the chorus of liminal voices in George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Jazz Codes’ words, stories, and figures swirl around the soundfield like fish in a murky tank, drifting into clarity, then obscured again just as quickly. It’s an entire genre in antimatter, from a semblance of ice melting in a glass (“Umsanzi”) to a long-gone trumpet hero (“Woody Shaw”). “Let us/ Breathe in Mother Mary Lou/ Father Ra/ Sister Billie/ Brother Shaw/ A Family of Blues too long to list,” read Moor Mother’s liner notes. “A Jazz funeral turned revival/ Twistaway from America’s strange fruits/ Into scats of Jazz code.”
Crucially, Jazz Codes doesn’t simply survey the dust of the 20th century; it points to the ongoing potential of the form. This is reflected in Ayewa’s expertly curated list of cutting-edge guests—like saxophonist Keir Neuringer (“Joe McPhee Nation Time Intro”), R&B multi-instrumentalist Orion Sun and pianist Jason Moran (“Ode to Mary”), and flutist Nicole Mitchell (“Arms Save”).
Still, there are so many other places to hear all these players; with time, might Jazz Codes get lost in the sauce? Based on the quality of the music and expedient running time, it shouldn’t. At 18 tracks in 43 minutes with no serious missteps, Jazz Codes rewards repeated listening.
Morgan Enos (JazzTimes)
