Moor Mother Announces 'Jazz Codes' Digital Deluxe

Called "a melodic tone poem with stunning clarity, calm, tuneful choruses, and lustrous complexity," by FLOOD, the composer, poet, vocalist and educator Moor Mother, aka Camae Ayewa, released the critically acclaimed album 'Jazz Codes' in the summer of 2022. Today she has announced a new digital deluxe version of the record, to be released May 19, with the new track "We Got The Jazz" feat. Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro.

"We Got The Jazz" is me thinking about how mediocre a lot of popular music is, about its capitalistic structures and how those placements are bought and paid for," Ayewa said of the song's meaning.

"I'm speaking about the whitewashing of who's allowed to participate in jazz, who is allowed to participate in poetry, and asking where the room for innovation is, now and in the future. It's also me thinking about my jazz band, Irreversible Entanglements, and how we've toured the world destroying stages, uplifting audiences, and inspiring everyone on the jazz scene with or without recognition. I'm also speaking about my own influence on the culture."

'Jazz Codes' 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.

In its warm, densely layered course through jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, and other Black classical traditions, Jazz Codes sets the ear blissfully adrift and unhitches the mind from habit. Through her work she illuminates the principles of her multidisciplinary collaborative practice Black Quantum Futurism, a theoretical framework for perceiving and adjusting reality through art, writing, music, and performance, informed by historical Black ontologies.

Tomorrow night Moor Mother will be a part of a show at PS122 in Queens with the artist Kevin Beasley, L'Rain and more. The next day on March 24 she will perform at The Cleveland Museum of Art with Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains and more, and at the end of the month she will perform at Knoxville's Big Ears Music Festival as Moor Mother and with her groups Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss; all upcoming dates are listed below.

TOUR DATES

3/23 - Queens, NY @ Performance Space New York
3/24 - Cleveland, OH @ The Cleveland Museum of Art
4/1 - Knoxville, TN @ Big Ears Festival