Moor Mother - The Great Bailout
The Quietus
When HM Treasury tweeted in February 2018, “Here’s today’s surprising #FridayFact. Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes,” their spectacularly misguided self-congratulation reinforced the whitewashing of Britain’s wretched legacies. North Philadelphia experimental sound artist, poet and community activist, Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa), turns her attention to this in her ninth studio album The Great Bailout, a dauntless dissection of the British slave trade, slavery and colonialism.
Starting with the raspy, lamenting vocals of Lonnie Holley, a ghost from the past watching slave ships being unloaded, ‘Guilty’ is a deeply affecting opener. It is punctuated with Ayewa’s spoken word, “Taxpayers of erasure, of relapse, of amnesia / Did you pay off the drama?”, which introduces the salient theme of the record. Namely, the aforementioned tweet and its reference to the loan which was taken out under the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act. To appease 46,000 British slave owners who were losing their human ‘property’ under the Act, a modern equivalent of £17 billion was paid out by British taxpayers (including, perversely, those descended from the enslaved).
Moor Mother shows the research that this album is rooted in on ‘All the Money’ which takes on a sinister register as it runs through historic landmarks of London. It’s interrogated by darkly overlapping whispers that repeatedly ask, “Who gave you all the money?” Al Sultani’s undulating operatic voice conjures an image of British aristocracy which drifts in and out like a recurring nightmare involving violence and theft.
‘Compensated Emancipation’ features Kyle Kidd belting out a gutsy blues juxtaposed with a pervasive drone that builds with tension. It is a reverently immersive event. Ayewa’s most incisive words on this album are here, “The Queen will be coming around to tell me more about Blackness / You will understand the hostile environment of breathing, walking, talking, dreaming against the law.”
Space and place are investigated in ‘Liverpool Wins’ which plays with electronic industrial sounds to evoke the building of an Empire with blood. The album closes with ‘Quantum’, a deeper dive into Ayewa’s school of thought as one half of Black Quantum Futurism – centred around the idea linear time keeps oppressed people in narrow temporal bands where they can’t access their past or future to control their own narrative. Her previous works like Black Encyclopedia of the Air and Jazz Codes are drenched in this fascinating extension of Afrofuturism and Black musical traditions as a vehicle for political thought – also evident in Ayewa’s free jazz collective, Irreversible Entanglements. Similarly, in The Great Bailout Ayewa recontextualises history to show its scars on our present-day environment.
The Great Bailout is a hauntingly edifying experience born out of intergenerational trauma, political rage and suffering. Echoey vocals and experimental composition hold this album up as a house of mirrors – a forceful confrontation with an ugly past with no way out. Its counterpoint is a feeling of strength. Through this comes a profound sense of recovery, a restoration of freedom.
Share this article:
Sat Mar 02 11:57:14 GMT 2024Pitchfork
Read Boutayna Chokrane’s review of the album.
Thu Mar 14 04:00:00 GMT 2024Resident Advisor
"I wanna fuck up some orchestra stuff [laughs], I really wanna fuck up classical music," the Philadelphia-based poet, activist, sound experimentalist and Afrofu..
Tue Mar 19 06:00:00 GMT 2024A Closer Listen
Seldom does an album catch a listener so off guard, enthralling and entertaining in equal measure. The Great Bailout is another in a string of confrontational triumphs for Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa), who was last heard on Aho Ssan’s Rhizomes. The collaborations continue with Mary Lattimore, C. Spencer Yeh and a host of independent luminaries united for a common cause: the exposure of colonialist atrocities by Britain. The central crime: the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which provided compensation to slave owners for the loss of “their property” while keeping unpaid slavery going for another four years. Moor Mother traces the history of the financial landfall not only to Britain’s architecture, but to the nation’s reigning politicians and corporations.
The horror peaks in the heart of the album. “Death by Longitude” is the sort of track that makes one sit up and take notice. Beginning with shifts and creaks reminiscent of a slave ship, the track erupts with the incendiary truth. No colonialist is spared ~ “The Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Americans … all aboard.” And then the most frightening phrase: there’s no need to time travel here. Screams bellow in the background, similar to their use in the film “The Zone of Interest,” which deals with similar themes of sociopathic apathy. The music grows frantic. Who … builds … death … like … this?
In the subsequent “My Souls Been Anchored,” hammers against wood suggest the construction of yet another ship, contrasted by an African spiritual. In “Liverpool Wins,” Moor Mother calls out the churches, universities and stadiums built on the backs of the payoff, which totaled 20 million pounds then, 65 billion pounds now. The music is industrial, as frightening to the common listener as the sounds of slavery are to the enslaved. Once you step on the ship, you start dying.
It’s impossible not to connect “God Save the Queen” (feat. justmadice) to the song of the same name by the Sex Pistols, originally banned by the BBC. If anything, the new song is even more accusatory, and makes a greater historical case; fortunately for the monarchy, it’s not as catchy as the popular punk anthem. The opera-Test Dept.-esque “All the Money” (feat. Alya Al-Sultani), is also terrifying, and will probably miss Top of the Pops, but once it’s heard, it can’t be unheard: Tower of London, falling down, falling down. The contemporary parallels are international and inescapable: border disputes, violence against immigrants, exploited minorities, systems stacked against the poor. In a recent interview in The Guardian, Moor Mother declares, “somebody needs to tell the truth.”
The Great Bailout is hard to listen to and impossible to turn off; the collage of words and sounds is mesmerizing, to the extent that one can’t turn away. The album identifies some of the guilty, but not all, challenging listeners to ask uncomfortable questions: are we also implicit, as we profit off the atrocities of our ancestors? And are we creating new horrors of our own? (Richard Allen)
Sat Mar 30 00:01:45 GMT 2024The Free Jazz Collective 0
By Troy Dostert
Although Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) has received justified acclaim for her vocal work with Irreversible Entanglements, that praise has to some extent overshadowed the attention given to the substantial series of solo albums and other collaborative projects she has pursued since the 2010s. Perhaps that will change with The Great Bailout. With a harrowing and relentless interrogation of Great Britain’s legacy of slavery and colonialism, this uncompromising artist sketches a world in sound that demands to be heard. It is a listening experience both challenging and immensely rewarding.
This is Moor Mother’s ninth studio album under her own name, and her third with the Anti- label. Her previous Anti- release, 2022’s Jazz Codes, was a kaleidoscopic engagement with the jazz tradition itself, drawing from a pan-idiomatic template in celebrating and scrutinizing the work of artists from Woody Shaw to Joe McPhee to Mary Lou Williams. The sound collages on The Great Bailout continue to mine the resources of jazz, but they appear as fugitive traces rather than sustained explorations. But they are no less powerful for that, to be sure.
The opening strains of “Guilty” establish the trajectory of the album, with a disarmingly lilting soundscape undergirded by harpist Mary Lattimore and vocalists Lonnie Holley and Raia Was, before Moor Mother’s emphatic entrance in which she questions and confronts the historical weight of oppression through half-whispered, half-shouted entreaties. It is a dichotomous effect that recurs throughout the record: the music, which is sometimes quite beautiful, is continuously disrupted and threatened by the horrific subject matter.
Each track is tightly constructed, without an emphasis on spontaneous improvisation. The voices from the jazz world are instead woven deftly into the fabric of each track: “Liverpool Wins” contains haunting echoes from Sarah Vaughan, while Lester Bowie’s trumpet winds its way through “God Save the Queen,” and Angel Bat Dawid’s inimitable clarinet moans like a wraith through the brutally grim “South Sea.” But as with Jazz Codes, these elements are filtered through Moor Mother’s broad stylistic prism, one that seeks to move beyond musical category altogether, into a much more amorphous realm.
The album’s title is a reference to England’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which resulted in a massive taxpayer-funded effort to compensate British slaveholders when slavery was finally abolished in the empire. The fortunes of thousands, including the ancestors of Prime Ministers William Gladstone and David Cameron, were enlarged through this unprecedented act of government largesse (or theft, more accurately). While the attempt to obtain justice for the long legacy of slavery both in Britain and elsewhere will undoubtedly remain pressing for generations to come, recordings like The Great Bailout will continue their vital work of disturbing, troubling, and probing the consciences of those who will have to heed this call.