MOOR MOTHER releases ‘Jazz Codes’ digital deluxe edition

“Moor Mother’s beats, if you’d call them that, tend to sound like stardust incinerating itself … her new album, ‘Jazz Codes,’ has an air of intervention, but also of mischievous play and mystery.” – The New York Times

“In ‘Jazz Codes’’ promiscuity, Moor Mother plots an escape from the oppressive confines of institutional memory.” – Pitchfork

“Moor Mother’s work is often stark and excoriating … Camae Ayewa forces the listener to confront blood-soaked history and the bottomless sorrow of multi-generational mourning, coming at you like a priestess of the apocalypse.” – Stereogum

Today the artist and educator Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa is releasing a digital deluxe version of her 2022 album ‘Jazz Codes’ with three new tracks. “Moor Mother’s ‘Jazz Codes’ is a master class in giving vintage sounds a new spin,” declared The Fader. Listen to the album HERE.

‘Jazz Codes’, produced with frequent collaborator Olof Melander, sprung from a book of poems by the same name, a collection written in honor of jazz and blues icons like Woody Shaw, Amina Claudine Myers, and Mary Lou Williams. In a shift from the noise-inflected sound of her previous albums, Ayewa began writing songs with R&B sweetness, songs that asked for singers to accompany her raps and spoken word transmissions. 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.

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.

https://moormother.net/

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