Recommended Album: Moor Mother – ‘The Great Bailout’

Not only is Camae Ayewa a poet and a multi-instrumentalist, but she’s proving herself to be one of the most important historians of her generation through her art as Moor Mother. Her excavation of Black history and its future impact as to how this world became the way it is now is why she’s a known time traveler, as the Philadelphia-based experimental artist breaks the barriers of sound to interconnect dots not surfaced enough in today’s conversations. The Great Bailout, her ninth studio album, is one of her more thematically focused listens, yet a more viscerally noisy turn in respect to recent years, arriving as another remarkable sonic shift to where 2021’s Black Encyclopedia of the Air and 2022’s Jazz Codes delved into broader thesis statements on the evolution Black Experience by honoring traditional Black music (free jazz, soul, and hip-hop, more explicitly) in its atmosphere. Opener “GUILTY” acts as a hopesfall narrated by the weathered voice of activist and songwriter Lonnie Holley, the ghostly echoes of vocalist Raia Was, and strings curated by the great harpist Mary Lattimore, introducing its narrative of a western world built on the bloody backs, greed, and generational trauma of British colonialism centuries ago. The listen then breaks into a schism from that point forward that traverses yesteryear and the present where the album’s central highlights “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN”, “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION”, and “DEATH BY LATITUDE” exploit, justly so, an ugly history that has whitewashed death and racist atrocities through her channeled anger. Ayewa — joined in breath and instrument by British-Iranian soprano Alya Al-Sultani, fellow artist and activist Kyle Kidd, cosmic jazz instrumentalists Vijay Iyer, Angel Bat Dawid, the ensemble justmadnice, and the vocal collective Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty — is posing the heaviest questions in these drowned facts in a broken sonic cosmos befitting of its energy in industrial trap beats warped around discordant swells of brass as well as splatters of heavy industrial electronic friction. Be it her role as messenger or the maker of noise, The Great Bailout is another fascinating chapter in her role as the keeper of history and interrupter of the space-time continuum.

Highlights: “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN”, “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION”, “DEATH BY LATITUDE”

Moor Mother’s The Great Bailout is available now on ANTI- Records.