Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968

November 6, 2023

Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968 reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

Aretha Franklin’s fear of flying was well known, and often used as an explanation for her dearth of overseas public engagements. Her phobia was the result of a particularly turbulent plane ride in 1984, prior to which she’d flown all over the globe. The latest release from Franklin’s estate, Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968, attests to the good fortune enjoyed by those able to see Franklin before she limited her travel. Recorded at the height of her career, which took place during her early years at Atlantic Records, the album offers irrefutable proof of Franklin’s prodigious contributions to American culture.

While at her first label, Columbia Records, Franklin was allowed only to sing, and as a result, never scored a major hit. Not until moving to Atlantic did she begin to arrange her own songs, and accompany herself on the piano. Franklin’s first studio session for Atlantic was to record “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You).”

“It just wasn't coming off,” Franklin told NPR. “And finally someone said, ‘Aretha, why don't you sit down and play?’ And I did, and it just happened. It all just happened. We arrived, and we arrived very quickly.” Quickly indeed, between 1967 and 1968 Franklin scored ten Top 10 hits. “I Never Loved a Man” was credited, by music critic Peter Guralnick, as an uniquely monumental moment in American music. This was the energy in the room there at Berns Salonger on May 2nd, 1968.

Franklin's gospel idiom is on full display on Berns Salonger, as are her most famous secular soul recordings: “Natural Woman”, “I Never Loved a Man,” “Dr. Feelgood.” What has always struck me about Aretha's signature songs is their palpable sexuality. Something she was often coy about in interviews. It’s hard to believe she was naive to her own sensuality, or rather, that of her recordings. These are devout songs, all of them, but the object of their devotion is very often a man and his prowess. Very few singers can muster such carnality — can invoke a hallelujah not for God but for his masculine image to be found in dark, hot rooms. The song, also my favorite, which most displays that tension between the holy and the horny, is “Dr. Feelgood.” The best rendition of which appears on this record. The third song in the set, and the first to be introduced by Aretha’s banter, sees her, for the first time during the show, sit down at the piano. She says, “In a moment I will take the seat of the young man you’ve heard accompany me so ably.” She takes Gary’s seat, lets out a fake cough, complains of laryngitis, and says “I’d like to talk to you right now about that Dr. who visited me…” Then begins the piano: moody, bluesy, petulant. Then begins the voice: moody, bluesy, petulant. “I don’t want nobody always sittin’ ‘round me. And. My. Man.” That is a hungry voice, a voice unwilling to share, a voice demanding her full portion of man. This is Aretha the singer and the pianist at her absolute best; taking the idiom of her church into more immediate, more exciting domains; sanctifying the daily goings-on between bodies.

It really doesn’t matter what Aretha sings about. Much ado has been made about the feminist legacy of “Respect,” her unexpected mastery of the tenor aria “Nessun Dorma,” and her relationship to the black church and the civil rights movement. Womanhood, virtuosity, faith, and blackness were all integral to Aretha the person, and the artist. But the crucial element was always the voice. Not the place or time, the lyric, language, or the theme. What made her great was that whenever she sang about something it became dignified, elevated, baptized. Her voice was an instrument of consecration, and whatever enjoyed its attention was better off as a result.

The experience of listening to Berns Salonger is one of rapture, and of a directional paradox. On one hand, she herself ascends, perilously, grasping for whatever piece of sky within her reach. On the other hand, is the descent, equally perilous; the avalanche falling on our heads. That has always been my experience of encountering genius: being bombarded, battered, besieged, until I submit totally to the phenomenon. Genius makes the critic’s job difficult. There isn’t much to say, even less to sift or parce; you cannot draw lines in moving sand. We are reduced to eyewitnesses, testifiers. Doomed to paint, always inadequately, some impression of what happened then and there, what is still happening here and now. Some voices liberate us from our myopic view of time and space. They perpetuate themselves — as does the universe — byway of infinitely many reactions, forever rending the vibrational fabric. Aretha’s is one of those voices. In her sound, accent, disposition, is the convergence and divergence of many ancestors and of all progeny. Past and future lose their meaning. They are too small for Aretha. Perhaps that is why I’ve never truly grieved her death, because she feels no more lost to me now than she felt possessed by me then. She has always been an aberration, an encompassing presence. She had always about her the shimmer of a ghost, and a holy one.

Aretha Franklin Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm May 2nd, 1968, Lantower Records.

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.

Hotel San Claudio

June 12, 2023

Hotel San Claudio. Mark de Clive-Lowe, Shigeto, and Melanie Charles.

Reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

I hazard that the pre-eminent starting point for discussing jazz is Albert Murray’s 1970 essay “The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream.” As someone occupied with writing about music, and as someone partial to jazz, I must recall one line or another from that essay daily. In fact, an informal rubric has evolved from which I leap into the deep-end of interpretation: when listening to a record for the first time, which line(s) from “Blues Idiom” come to mind most readily? In the case of Hotel San Claudio, I report that from beginning to end that novel effort evoked Murray’s assertion that the blues musician, when playing, is:

“Extemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there” (472).

Melanie Charles, one-third of San Claudio’s trio, along with Shigeto and Mark de Clive-Lowe, affirms that notion with her self-stated mission to “make jazz trill again.” or in other words, to take “jazz from the museum to the streets.” “Possibility," which Murray thought so integral to the blues idiom, is also a serviceable reduction of San Claudio's sensibility. The record spreads its arms in warm embrace of newness, alterity, and, to use an unfortunately voguish word, innovation. A decidedly post-acoustic album, San Claudio honors and expands the legacy of spiritual jazz with its electronic saturation and various nods to world music. Though certainly it is conscious of its lineage, dedicating as it does three tracks to variations on Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” San Claudio's spirit of homage does not yield to nostalgia however. The record integrates a multitude of novel voices and allusions. MdcL’s electronic compositions allude to the eastern in particular, as he continues his sonic exploration of his Japanese heritage, which originated from his 2019 Heritage series. One of San Claudio’s tracks, Bushido, appears in other forms on both records. The version on San Claudio is punctuated by mystical-flutes and staccato electronic elements, offering a sort of well-intended chinoiserie akin to Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite. “Strings” features a rapped vocal performance by Charles, whose vocals are a delightful presence throughout. Her singing and rapping possess the syllabic play definitive of jazz singing; on “Strings” she rhymes “melody” and “felony” on the open “O” like “melOdy” and “felOny.” As for the instrumental components, Shigeto’s drumming characteristically criss-crosses genre borders, sometimes offering a steady rock n’ roll presence, while at other times demanding attention with a cymbal-heavy, ornamental jazz voice. As always, Charles’ flute playing is stunningly accomplished, adhering to the precedent of the great jazz horn-players; her every note played represents an infinity of notes not played, thereby narrowing the continuum of possibility for the solo. That process of elimination – of trying to find the right expression – is the process whereby a jazz solo devolves, and finally dissolves. This technical neurosis so inextricable from improvisation is the formal counterpoint to Jazz’s general ethos of exploration.

Yet neither Charles’ contributions nor San Claudio’s whole are mere exercises in virtuosity. Rather the record feels playful, hopeful, and deeply purposeful. The artists emanate a strong belief in the relevance of what they are doing, in the indispensability of music, and especially jazz, to “play with the possibilities that are also there.” As our culture congeals and codes of rightness harden in opposition to one another, a trillness of jazz might be redemptive. A commitment on the part of our artists to play to the possibilities – which despite our interminably dour state, are also there – offers an avenue of much-needed resilience. An avenue worthy of our attention, support, and protection. In “Blues Idiom,” Murray continues that under the idiom’s sway its acolyte is not “disconcerted by intrusions, lapses, shifts in rhythm, intensifications of tempo…but is inspired by them to higher and richer levels of improvisation” (472). San Claudio in isolation certainly represents a higher and richer level of improvisation – a good-faith effort on the part of younger musicians to pay homage, while ferociously dedicating their lives to the “particular time, place, and circumstance” in which they find themselves (468). In application, San Claudio adds to jazz’s queer essence – its deviation from ephemeral metrics of normativity – and blueprints new modes of aesthetic re-action, offering a polyphonic path through and out of what might otherwise seem to be all too insurmountable.

Citation:

Murray, Albert. “The Blues Idiom”, 1970. The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970, ed. Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, April 2021.

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.

Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

April 25, 2023

Ocean Blvd, by Lana Del Rey, reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

When I was 15 years old there was nothing more romantic than Lana Del Rey singing “Gods and Monsters:”

In the land of Gods and Monsters

I was an angel looking to get fucked hard

Like a groupie incognito, posing as a real singer

Life imitates art…

‘This is Heaven, what I truly want’,

It's innocence lost.

A decade later, after having finally compiled my own list of transgressions, that song feels more salient than ever, though more painful, and the furthest thing from romantic. Only now do I realize that Del Rey, who is 13 years older than myself, sang those lyrics retrospectively as a dirge for an innocence already lost. A backwards glance repeated on her latest album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? Upon listening, one feels that the album represents an imperfect attempt to reconcile dissonant images of the self; in universal terms, the past, present, and future selves, and in Del Rey’s case, the private and public selves. Though increasingly concerned with loftier, more essential human predicaments than the mere emotional turmoil of earlier work (“Will I die/Or will I hit that ten-year mark/Where I beat the extinction of telomeres?”), Ocean Blvd still features Del Rey’s signatures: erotic melancholia (“fuck me till I’m dead/Love me until I love myself”), and sun-soaked placenames (Griffith, The Beverly Center, Genesee, Long Beach, Monaco, Rosemead). As the headline for Lindsay Zoladz’s The New York Times review put it, “Lana Del Rey Plunges Into the Deep, but Never Abandons the Shallow.'' Indeed, the album strikes a tonal pirouette, balanced on a stylized earnestness – never raw, but always sincere; possessed of honesty made more honest by its implicit form. A perplexed, melancholy record, by turns self-indulgent and self-aware, superficially, Ocean Blvd does lend itself to misconstrual as twee: “I’m swee-ee-eet/Bare fee-ee-eet”, Del Rey sings in “Sweet.” But the record displays an elemental disillusionment with Del Rey's own perennial images, contexts, and mythologies; with the American dream, with the West as land of promise, and with the redemptive power of feminine glamor. The songs contain many sad acknowledgments that the old tricks no longer work. A feeling on Del Rey’s part that she has irremediably deviated from her own script, her roving romanticism no longer effective as the emotional crutch it once was. “Exotic people and places don’t take the place of being your child,” Del Rey sings on “Fingertips”, the meandering piano-driven reflection on familial loss which forms the thematic core of Ocean Blvd. However, despite the critical consensus, Del Rey asserts that she has never been a satirist. Her nostalgia for all things Americana is earnest, as is her pain at falling somewhat out of love with them. Del Rey laments on "Fingertips":

"They say there's irony in the music.

It's a tragedy, I see nothing Greek in it.”

Though grieving the loss of a certain youthful idealism Del Rey does not lay it to rest but conducts an autopsy; eager to write a thorough forensic report on a version of herself it seems has died. From “A&W”:

“Did you know a singer can still be

Looking like a side piece at 33?

God’s a charlatan, don’t look back…

I’m a ghost now, look how they found me

It’s not about having someone to love me anymore

No, this is the experience of being an American whore.”

Therein lie both the obituary of a girl who wants to be loved at any costs (think Ultraviolence: “Jim hit me and it felt like a kiss”), and the announcement of a new woman who though content to be a whore, needs you to know that she is an American whore – ‘plunges into the deep but never abandons the shallow,’ indeed. The most crucial intent of Ocean Blvd is to document the turmoil of an artist struggling to live authentically within the confines of fame, while at the same time refusing to relinquish the highly stylized nature of her work. Much writing about Del Rey either accuses her of being unknowingly ridiculous, or praises her as being deftly ironic. But she is neither Jessica Rabbit nor Joan Didion – she is an artist dispositionally incapable of understanding the dilemma between style and substance. It says more about us than it does Del Rey that we are so unwilling to believe that a woman demonstrably possessed by keen intelligence would unironically sympathize with the sentimental, the romantic, and the glamorous. More than ever does “life imitates art” apply, in fact Ocean Blvd functions as lyrical companion to Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying; refuting the obligation to be “symbolic of any age.”

Unfortunately for Del Rey, despite her reluctance, she is an enormously famous figure, and Ocean Blvd, much like her masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell, presents dialogue between Del Rey herself and the numerous avatars we have devised to contain her. In “A&W” Del Rey regards her own ambivalent role as an iconoclast unwittingly revered as an icon by a reductive public, even the most sycophantic members of which seem incapable of accepting the entire aspect of this incongruous artist: “What went wrong/I’m a princess/I’m divisive/Maybe I’m just like this.” Case in point: the diffuse, low simmer of indignance among Del Rey fans at her inclusion of “Judah Smith Interlude.” The interlude consists of a recording of Judah Smith preaching, set to a piano arrangement by Jack Antonoff, Del Rey’s most crucial collaborator. Smith, infamous for his homophobia, and blatant mega-church profiteering, currently enjoys a chokehold on the piety of Hollywood’s elite. His church offers a fashionable, evangelical alternative to passé Scientology. Yet even the most cursory reading must conclude that Del Rey’s sample is a skeptical lambast. Del Rey and her anonymous companions are quite literally heard laughing and repeating certain of Smith’s soundbites in mocking tone. When Smith describes God as the “rhino designer”, Del Rey audibly chortles, and says “rhino designer?” As Coleman Spilde put it for The Daily Beast:

“While ‘Judah Smith Interlude’ might be a point of contention for fans, it’s ultimately an ironic and inflammatory sendup of commodified spirituality and a reminder that Del Rey’s artistic ethos is firmly about pleasing no one but herself.”

The textual mishandling so prevalent in popular discourse on Del Rey’s work discourages any who hold out hope for our culture’s basic literacy. In that sense, Ocean Blvd is, along with most of Del Rey’s best work, scriptural – requiring delicate and bold exegesis. Ocean Blvd is only the latest in an illustrious strand of albums threatening to bore or outrage any persons seized by sensibilities they are unwilling to temporarily set aside, in this case, for a mere one hour and seventeen minutes. Ironically, nothing about Del Rey’s recent work can be construed as provocative, at least not in the same lineage as pop-culture’s paradigmatic provocateurs. Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Mick Jagger, or Madonna have little in common with either Del Rey’s lyrical content, or her public image. An image not in any way as closely tended, as reliant on attention, or as teleological. An oeuvre totally independent of its ends, the same ends which often confound their originator. Therein lies the crux of Del Rey’s divisiveness: she is indifferent to what we think. In this particular moment, can one fathom a bigger social sin?

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.

M3GAN Film Score

February 20, 2023

M3GAN Film Score by Anthony Willis, reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor

Perhaps you’ve seen her dancing in a hallway; her gangly limbs swinging with sinister ease. Or perhaps you’ve seen her galloping on all fours through the woods, her neat pea-coat belying the blood she’s soon to shed. In whatever light you cast M3gan, the protagonist of her namesake movie, she seems to be in on a joke that we are not. We, human beings, are not privy to her inner-world: that of a cutting edge artificial intelligence designed to learn about, and protect, at all costs, the children we cannot be bothered to raise ourselves. The film tells the story of Gemma, a computer engineer for a toy company, who assumes legal guardianship of her niece, Cady, after her sister’s death. Inspired by her difficulty connecting with Cady, Gemma creates M3gan to meet her boss’s demands for a new, more competitive product. Taking a wealth of cues from the Child's Play franchise, M3gan walks the tight-rope of camp with all the agility of its antagonist.

The film is enhanced by its score, composed by Anthony Willis, who masterfully replicates the film’s tongue-in-cheek exercise in horror. Many of the compositions feature lush strings and plump keyboards, suggesting on the surface all the manufactured optimism and sincere commerce of the tech industry. Yet almost every piece possesses a melancholic doubt, a worried counterpoint. This counterpoint, though never blatantly sinister, is eerie. The suspicion that something is too good to be true, now a trope of cautionary tales about technological advancement, sneaks into the film and the score immediately. Both the characters and the audience feel as though they have seen something in their peripheral vision that they would rather not think about. Although blinders-on self-deceit is a real human proclivity, it does not last long in M3gan. Refreshingly, Gemma heeds the counterpoint before it is too late.

Not content to be just another apocalyptic tale, M3gan succeeds, almost incidentally, at being an effective personal drama. Despite the fact that M3gan the character has instantly joined the ranks of beloved horror antagonists like Chucky, Jason, and Annabelle, AI serves only an allegorical function in the film. Motherhood is the thematic crux of M3gan. The loss of one mother, the reluctance of a surrogate, and the lethal eagerness of an artificial one. Loss, surrogate, artificial. With those three words, we might be getting close to the heart of M3gan: a heart devastated by loss, roving for relief, and jumping at the false-promise of panacea. Maternity is thematically integral not only to the film but also to the score, which alludes to the diabolical lullaby of Rosemary's Baby. That haunting "la la la." especially influences "On the Subject of Death.'' The two tracks in the score that feature vocals are lullabies. In "Tell Me Your Dreams," M3gan sings to Cady:

If you should feel alone/Or that your world has come apart/Just reach out and you’ll see a friend is never very far./Tell me your dreams, I will dream them too,/I’m so glad I finally found you.

In the most memorable scene, M3gan, who has just dismembered a boy who bullied Cady, tucks Cady into bed. Cady asks whether M3gan hurt the boy. After offering a vague response, M3gan sings a snippet of Sia’s “Titanium” to lull Cady into sleep. The chorus, “you shoot me down/ but I don’t fall/ I am titanium,” takes on a new meaning in the context of the film, as M3gan is literally made of titanium. Sia recorded a full acoustic version of the song, called “Titanium (M3gan’s Version),” in which the heart-stopping anthemic quality of the original is liberated from the deadweight of its electronic production. Over sparse, unresolved piano chords, Sia unleashes a nuclear event of a vocal performance, where that undeniable melody finds full fruition.

Not only maternal, M3gan is distinctly feminine. In fact, M3gan draws a triangle between Gemma, Cady, and M3gan, all female (ostensibly in M3gan's case), characters. The goings on of men are restricted to the outside world, a world the film makes sure to sketch only in necessary detail. The real world of M3gan is the relationships between the three. A complicated family dynamic if there ever was one. Where M3gan owes her existence to Gemma and Gemma owes her professional reputation to M3gan. Where Cady, despite relying on Gemma, feels deeply torn between her aunt and her best friend: the machine who assuages her grief with all the devoted attention Gemma can never seem to spare. Echoing the cramped domestic drama of the film, the score uses sonic cues to conjure a twisted ambience of Saturday morning cartoons, ill-fated outings, and the incongruity between the juvenile and adult worlds. These cues are reflected in the track titles: “Those Aren’t Toys,” “Reluctant Guardian,” and “Attachment Theory.”

Despite its necessary handling of artificial intelligence, M3gan stands resolutely in the personal. Though the film does indulge in a few blundered moments of social commentary, it largely avoids the fate of too many horror movies neutered by their own ambition. M3gan triumphs over its thematic potholes through its aesthetic might. The film's lasting impression is neither sermon nor exploit, but a truthful analogy for grief and the dire consequences of trying to outrun it. The score echoes the film in every respect with its nuanced inversion of the plastic and its probing queries into the merit of feeling good in a bad world.

M3GAN Film Score by Anthony Willis, 2022.

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.

Jazz Codes

January 16, 2023

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.