Moor Mother is at war with time. The Philadelphian poet and experimental rap artist has theorised through her work a means to rewrite the exclusion of women and Black voices from history itself, a practice she refers to as Black Quantum Futurism. For her, linear time is a captor that should be fought against by way of creating ‘counter chronologies.’ Her weapons of choice are the creation of art, music, and most significantly, poetry. It’s a theory that in practice, presents a conundrum. Language, specifically English, is a paradox in itself when attempting to rewrite the history of oppression by virtue of its use as a part of that oppression. Moor Mother’s response to this problem has usually been to weaponise her words, relying on visceral imagery, body horror, and the macabre manipulation of her voice into something posthuman while performing spoken word. This has resulted in her distinct obscure and abstracted ideations of hip-hop and sound art, often multidisciplinary in nature. But still, words have largely remained at the core of her practice. Last year’s Black Encyclopaedia Of The Air for instance, digressed from her previous approach by placing focus on her utterances in expanses of sparse production. For the first time, it seemed that she wasn’t so much acting against linear rhythm, but playing into it in order to understand the void. The result is what she’s jokingly referred to as her “sell out era” or most “accessible” work to date, leaving some to wonder if she had given up on the fight altogether. Her latest album Jazz Codes shows the opposite is true; she just took a moment to better understand the enemy. As such, Jazz Codes sees a more wizened Moor Mother pick up where she left off a few years back, and presents her most significant shift away from weaponising language toward weaponising the experience as a whole.
Download and stream Jazz Codes here
Jazz Codes returns to the approach of 2019’s Circuit City by subverting the conventions of historically Black music styles. Running through influences from blues, soul, hip-hop, and jazz, the album is made up of a collection of short, punchy sound collages that weave Moor Mother’s poetry into elliptical, far reaching soundscapes. Originally conceived as a book of poems, Jazz Codes evolved naturally over lockdown as Moor Mother collaborated virtually with a number of artists, all of whom twist and weave their contributions into the album’s oscillating expanse. It’s inherently futurist; the first word uttered on the album is ‘quantum.’ Though for its poetic origins, Moor Mother’s words take on a different role to her previous projects. She’s not so much spitting bars like knives than chanting mantras, assuming the role of shaman as she leads you through guided meditations of sorts. Meditation Rag is the most clear example of this, with Moor Mother chanting through the history of ragtime and attempting to locate it in the future. Especially enchanting are the moments she slips in between melody, becoming a secondary narrative voice. On Golden Lady, she takes on the tone of gravel as she dances with the woozy jazz-soul of Melanie Charles’s voice. She appears vocoded beneath Wolf Weston on Dust Together. What becomes clear on Jazz Codes is that, unlike most of her work where her words were the backbone, here they become a small part of a much larger whole. Tracks like the opening collage UMZANZI loop phrases like a trance, on this track in particular scored by the genteel plucks of Mary Lattimore’s harp. On Arms Save, her poetry begins barely audible but rather a spectral echo in a chamber of saxophone and ambience. Thus, where Jazz Codes succeeds most is in the music itself, or the culmination of its various parts. The way these styles and genres collapse into each other creates a sort of temporal vortex in which Moor Mother finds, or rather conjures, space for healing.
By respecting the practice of each style she melts together, she essentially maps the history of Black music in cyclical fashion, attempting to detach the mind from learnt patterns and thus evoke the possibility for temporal transcendence. It’s no simple undertaking, but the scope of her efforts is laudable. Most impressive is how Jazz Codes’s extensive list of collaborators fuse together, despite never being present in the same space. The work is a project that extends beyond the craft of written poetry. From its ensemble and their respective sounds and crafts, to its overall conceptual framework; it’s these that become the words of Jazz Codes more than the words themselves.
Watch the Jazz Codes short film below.
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