MOOR MOTHER
Jazz Codes (Anti-)
As the title Jazz Codes implies, the latest album from Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa and collaborators is a cryptic puzzle, one that’s hard to crack even armed with the intimidatingly wordy press release. And yet with each listen it divulges a few more of its secrets, enticing you into pressing play once again.
Umzansi sets the tone, with lyrics referencing aerospace agencies, war dances, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the elasticity of time. Free jazz, languid hip hop, Afrofuturist rhetoric and resolute faith in the liberatory capacity of music flow through the record, while Golden Lady and Ode To Mary are scrambled soul, Barely Woke dips into drum‘n’bass and Noise Jism is air traffic control intercepting communication between interplanetary craft.
Can an LP this unapologetically cerebral, this relentlessly out-there, find Moor Mother a wider audience? If Kendrick Lamar can turn a Glastonbury headline set into rapturously received politically charged performance art, then there’s a chance.
words BEN WOOLHEAD
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