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Posts tagged ‘Moor Mother’

Aug 16

Tunes of peace

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States. It’s a close-quarters observation of megalomania operating in real time, reaching its climax as the US/Israeli attack on Iran founders in the Strait of Hormuz, a hubristic miscalculation which one profoundly hopes will eventually define Trump’s reputation in the eyes of history. One can only wonder at the identity of the source who gave the two New York Times reporters such extraordinary material.

Now I need something to listen to, and here at hand is Peace Anthems, a new album of 10 short pieces by artists associated with Red Hook Records, the label founded five years ago by the producer Sun Chung, whose first release was Hanamichi, by the late pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. The new release, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is specially commissioned by Chung from the artists, who were invited to contribute pieces inspired by the theme of peace.

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, whose album Central Park made many best-of-the-year lists in 2024, provide two sketches, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine”. Smith also appears on “Three Years Later” with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the modular synthesiser player Qasim Naqvi, whose solo piece, “Al Badawi”, opens the album. Moor Mother’s invocations and BlankFor.ms’ electronics combine on “Imaginary Lines”. The singer Martha Deribe and the pianist Simone Maggio are heard on “War Is Over”. The guitarist Taylor Deupree, the trombonist Kalia Vandever and the bassist Thomas Morgan contribute Deupree’s composition “Wither Light and Airy”. Kit Downes gets two chances to demonstrate his skill with a pipe organ on “Into the Woods — Three Weary Calls” and “Closing Meditation for OM”, the second of which concludes the sequence.

The mood is restrained and reflective, as if the performers agreed that the message would be allowed to find its way gently into the listeners’ ears. These are little tone poems whose delicacy is their strength. And nowhere is that more apparent than on a piece called “The River of Imjin” by the Korean saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (photographed above), whose previous release, Near East Quartet, appeared in 2016, at a time when Sun Chung was an in-house producer for the ECM label.

“The River of Imjin”, bearing a name made famous by a battle between Chinese and UN (predominantly British) forces during the Korean War in 1951, finds Son overdubbing his tenor, bass clarinet and pump organ on two choruses of something that sounds like an old Methodist hymn tune. If you have fond memories of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide With Me”, John Surman’s “Doxology” or Don Cherry’s “Desireless”, then this fits right alongside them. After 414 pages describing Trump’s attempt to drag the world into his own darkness, sometimes two minutes and 15 seconds of music is all it takes to switch the light back on.

* Peace Anthems is out now on Red Hook Records. All proceeds will go to the International Red Cross: https://redhookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peace-anthems

Nov 11

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Entangled in Berlin

Irreversible Entanglements - Jazzfest Berlin 2018 - Haus der Berliner Festspiele (C) Camille Bl ake - Berliner Festspiele -8

Moor Mother with Irreversible Entanglements in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele (photo: Camille Blake)

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about the enormous wealth of music I heard last weekend during the first edition of Jazzfest Berlin curated by Nadin Deventer, who selected some very fine artists, devised interesting combinations and highlighted provocative themes while moving the festival’s furniture around sufficiently to make the event feel fresh and new.

Among the things I carried away with me included a surprise encore on the final night with Mary Halvorson joining Bill Frisell for a lovely guitar duet on “The Maid With the Flaxen Hair”, the title track of their highly recommended recent album on the Tzadik label; Kara-Lis Coverdale’s dramatic and absorbing pipe-organ solo recital in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church; Jaimie Branch’s electrifyingly bold trumpet solos with a quartet driven by the drummer Chad Taylor; the fantastically creative cello solos of Tomeka Reid with Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star International and a 12-piece Art Ensemble of Chicago; Kim Myhr’s mini-orchestra of strumming guitars; and Jason Moran’s centenary tribute to the soldier/bandleader James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters, which moved me more than I had expected.

In a festival-related event, there was also a chance to see the artist Arthur Jafa’s “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions” at the gallery of the collector Julia Stoschek. Having missed it at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I was particularly struck by one of the video pieces, which cut together YouTube footage of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Bootsy Collins, and an electrifying 10-minute performance by the gospel singer Lateria Wooten, singing “Nothing But the Blood” with the late Thomas Whitfield’s choir (which you can watch here).

The solo of the festival was played by Ingrid Laubrock with Mary Halvorson’s wonderful octet. Her tenor saxophone emerged from the warm textures of a ballad called, apparently, “No. 60” (the composer numbers her tunes before assigning them names), like Ben Webster taking his turn in an Ellington small group 80 years ago. The tone, the trajectory, the internal balance of the improvisation were all simply perfect. It was a moment of absolute beauty and the effect was spine-tingling,

But most of all I came away with the memory of Moor Mother, otherwise known as Camae Ayewa, a spoken-word artist from Chicago who was heard in several contexts, most notably with her group, Irreversible Entanglements, featuring Aquiles Navarro on trumpet, Keir Neuringer on alto, Luke Stewart on bass and Tcheser Holmes on drums. Her fierce, declamatory recitations seemed like the logical evolution of the poetry-and-jazz explorations of Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez. Over a highly expressive and flexible band, she drove her words home with a caustic power intensified by a command of economy and repetition echoing that of old blues singers. And then, after a short interval, she appeared in a duo with the Art Ensemble’s Roscoe Mitchell, who played his sopranino saxophone as she riffed on phrases borrowed from Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Here we had the old and the new, speaking directly to today’s world.