Jazz Codes by Moor Mother (reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor)
Despite its name, Moor Mother’s 2022 album, Jazz Codes, is not especially cryptic. Though complex, Jazz Codes obscures nothing, but upholds a polyphony where each voice depends on another for its full expression. On the collaborative free-jazz masterwork, Moor Mother, a.k.a, poet-professor Camae Aweya, weaves together homage, eulogy, manifesto, and praise into another genre all together. A genre that can claim, if it wants to, the title of gospel. Integrating the philosophy of Black Quantum Futurism, which she co-founded with Rasheedah Phillips, Aweya offers a full array of alternatives to what we think we know. Our pseudo-knowledge being the presumption that oppression, supremacy, and violence, are the received modes of our lives.
The past, as we call it, though BQF might challenge that label, is on full display in Jazz Codes, precisely because it is not the past at all. It is the blood of our moment; it is our sustenance, though not necessarily our origin. On GOLDEN LADY, guest-vocalist Melanie Charles sings with a neo-soul inflection, “The people in me, its magic,/Straight ahead/I let a song go out my heart.” Through the track’s spoken word portion, Aweya reveals one person who still lives, at least within her, “I be singing Billie even/When she blue (it's magic).” That aforementioned spirit of homage appears throughout the album, two of whose tracks (JOE MCPHEE NATION TIME INTRO, and WOODY SHAW), are named after prominent jazz musicians.
Classical allusions aside, the music of Jazz Codes, owing much to the acclaimed saxophonist Keir Nueringer, explores sound with exuberant sorrow. Although Jazz Codes has been described as the most sonically tranquil of Moor Mother’s output, including that with jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, the album still resolutely claims its place in the oeuvre of free and experimental jazz. On APRIL 7th, which lyrically alludes to a tragic female vocalist, seemingly Billie Holiday, or an amalgamation of wronged female jazz singers, Nueringer’s uncompromising solo, manages somehow, in the alchemy that defines Jazz Codes as a whole, to simultaneously name pain, air grievance, proclaim pride, and articulate hope. A virtuosic tonal balance reflected in Aweya’s voiceover, “It’s the weight of the southern breeze/It’s the baritone, the sweet lows/And the sweet chariots coming to take us home/Cast us out of the theater of freedom/The pretending to be alright in our solitudes/Taunted by memories that never die.” The oxymoronic image of a heavy breeze captures Jazz Codes’ insistence that our realities are both varied and arbitrary. A line that is a manifesto in and of itself, “Cast us out of the theater of freedom,” challenges marginalized peoples to ask ourselves, at exactly which tables ought we to sit?
Although Jazz Codes refutes presumption, its one given, its one solid ground, is jazz itself. But Aweya cross-examines even that lauded heritage. On the album’s last track, THOMAS STANLEY JAZZCODES OUTRO, guest-speaker and co-writer, Thomas Stanley, sermonizes on the word “jazz":
“It is a peculiar word jazz, its illegitimate origins lost in the murky brothels where it was conceived and birthed. But many observers have told us that jazz used to mean sex. And maybe it needs to go back to meaning sex, to being identified with coitus and copulation, hyper creativity, fecundity and birth…Now jazz jumps up like Lazarus if we allow it to re-discover itself as living music…released now from the prison bars of metrical stability.”
Note that jazz is a person, one capable of discovering things, most of all itself. Note that jazz is the way and the light, not the living truth, but living music. Jazz is release, a freedom without theater, a freedom that necessarily does not include stability. If you crave, and perhaps especially if you do not crave to be destabilized, Jazz Codes is an invitation.
More than an invitation, Jazz Codes is a prismatic total greater than the sum of its parts. Moor Mother's poetic thread throughout the album is super-numerical, alchemizing Jazz Codes’ aesthetic and ideological components into something new. A new vision and a new language, birthed in testimony of myriad alternatives to oppression, supremacy, and violence. Jazz Codes is good news, and like all good news, it feels, and it is, dangerous.
Jeromiah Taylor is a writer and photographer born, raised, and living on The Great Plains. As an essayist Jeromiah publishes widely in regional news outlets such as The Kansas Reflector, The Pennsylvania-Capitol Star, The Sunflower, and The Liberty Press. In 2022, Jeromiah completed his first poetry chapbook "Havoc Heaped on Boy Body," a deep-dive into queer latino manhood, and quarter-life issues, refracted through the images of horror cinema, folk religion, The Great American Songbook, and homoeroticism. He also, along with several members of Wichita State University's M.F.A in poetry program, co-organized and co-headlined, the language event, "Nothing is Necessary, Everything is a Choice: A Night of Spoken Word," hosted by MonikaHouse as a part of the 2022 National Independent Venue Week line-up.
Beyond creative pursuits, Jeromiah worked in copywriting roles for several non-profit organizations, and currently earns a living via that most storied of writerly day jobs: working at a coffee shop.
He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his partner, one impish dog, and one imperious cat.