MOOR MOTHER Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) delivers her latest album of import, The Great Bailout, using ironic economic terminology to satirise the British slave trade and its subsequent elision by the history books. A collaborative project that expands her original experimental hip-hop horizon, the likes of 'GUILTY' and 'ALL THE MONEY' hear new instrumental contributions from both canonical jazz artists and fresher faces, be they Lonnie Holley in the former camp and Mary Lattimore and Alya Al-Sultana in the latter. Moor Mother's revision is critical, calling out hidden ballasts such as the V&A Museum as purveyors of historical violence, while indulging a well-thought-out palette: no sound or texture is used here without careful thought as to its signification, whether wateriness to evoke the sense of drowning, or muted cacophony to recall the storms endured by victims of the trade in ships' hulls.

Review: If you thought Moor Mother's 2021 album Black Encyclopaedia of the Air was good - and it was a genuine triumph - wait until you hear this follow-up. In summary, Jazz Codes takes her impossible-to-pigeonhole personal style - a mixture of smoky trip-hop beats, heady ambient sounds, jazz instrumentation, thickset aural textures, crackly samples, soul vocals, spoken word monologues and trippy effects aplenty - and takes it to the next level. While the album features a dizzying array of guest vocalists and musicians (a complete list of which would run to several pages of A4), it never sounds like anything other than a Moor Mother album. It's her widescreen Afro-futurist vision, executed to perfection. Don't sleep!