Ecstatic Music is a long-running, sprawling series of concerts presented by the Kaufman Music Center that seeks to spark new creativity through collaboration. One memorable evening at The Green Space back in 2014 had Hospitality, those masters of bittersweet indie-rock, playing a set with Pannonia, a string quartet made up of high school students, with marvelous results.
So it was no surprise when one of the first questions posed by New Sounds maven John Schaefer to Camae Aweya, who performs as Moor Mother, had to do with the collaborative process that led to Six Movements, the work she was premiering on Friday, April 28th. Specifically, Schaefer wondered if the inclusion of jazz legend Henry Threadgill was a key part of its creation. She answered with a chuckle, reflecting on her last appearance at Kaufman, which had included Amina Claudine Myers and Nicole Mitchell, saying, “I knew if I had a chance to come back I had to go big.” Threadgill, the Pulitzer Prize-winning saxophonist and composer whose career goes back about 50 years, is certainly big enough!
Schaefer inquired further about her methods, about which she was slightly disingenuous: “It all just unfolds. It’s like fast food, but not fast food like McDonalds, it’s like good ingredients, when you have have good ingredients you don’t have to do much.”
“What is composition for you?” Schaefer also inquired. “To have fun and keep your sanity. Don’t fold, don’t bend.” And, finally he asked a question that was on my mind: “How much improvisation will we hear over the next hour?” Aweya’s response was perfect: “The miscellaneous is always happening!”
Here are some notes on the extraordinary miscellany that followed.
Starts with duet for violins, with Eddy Kwon and Olga Tytarenko, a Kaufman Music Center student, expressing contrasting lines, from tangled to melodic. “Let it all in,” Moor Mother intoned, “Let it all IN.”
Drummers Trae Crudup and Tcheser Holmes took their places, their mallets conjuring a restless rhythm while vocalist Kyle Kidd wailed in counterpoint to Moor Mother’s spoken word, a devastating, head-filling combination. Kidd’s voice seems to contain the entirety of jazz, blues, gospel, and more in its voluminous contours, all emitted with an absolute naturalism.
Moor Mother starts to rise to a fever pitch: “Let it all in…invisible worlds…can you see?…let it all in…we are never alone…,” when dancer Vitche-Boul Ra (who uses “It” pronouns) strides on stage, seemingly in its own head, dancing to the rhythm of the tambourine its playing. He’s soon joined by Melissa Almaguer, a tap dancer, wiry and joyful, but also performing more for herself than toward the crowd. As they dance amidst the music stands, it had the effect of a witnessing, an intimacy, like watching a rehearsal from an unseen vantage point. Almaguer displayed an incredible rhythmic flexibility and imagination, more like a percussionist than a traditional tap dancer. She often set the pace for what followed.
Moor Mother returns with the violinists and bassist Luke Stewart, who, like Holmes, also plays in Irreversible Entanglements with Aweya. Stewart and the other strings begin to jam while Moor Mother begins intoning the poem that accompanies Six Movements: “Get my Rag/Ol’ Rag of new Truths/Underground truths/Shadow Graft…” Her method begins to reveal itself in the way everything works together while different elements remain as distinct cells, like a bloodstream.
Moor Mother’s voice builds up a head of steam as her words diverge from the poem (more miscellany?), coming to a head with: “Not while the sound’s got a hold of us. Not tonight.” The drummers depart.
Alex Farr, another vocalist, joins the stage, followed by two more veterans of Irreversible Entanglements, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and sax/clarinet player Keir Neuringer, who begins rummaging around in a suitcase full of percussive stuff, before choosing something with which to make rhythmic noise. Stewart uses his bow on the bass, playing high up the neck, almost in an Arabic register, while Farr’s voice flows like water. Everyone else, including Moor Mother plays percussion, creating an immersive density.
It only gets denser when the drummers return and start up a sandstorm. Threadgill makes his way across the stage, wearing his legend lightly. He seems to take stock of what’s going on around him and starts playing the flute, long lyrical lines contrasting with the rhythmic churn and Moor Mother’s declamations: “Let’s shake this shit up.”
At one moment, Threadgill stops and stares at the music stand, as if trying to make sense of what he sees there. A theatrical gesture? Who knows…he goes back to blowing the flute. Moor Mother turns to the players, wiggles her fingers and all comes to a halt.
Then a mournful cell begins: trumpet, clarinet, and Threadgill, now on sax. It’s a gorgeous vignette, with his singing tone in conversation with the bright trumpet and woody clarinet.
Holmes, Crudup, and Stewart join in, adding an undertow, dragged along by Stewart’s bow across the strings, low and guttural. Kidd is back and she and Moor Mother intertwine their voices to say: “Hold on to it. Honor what’s sacred.”
All through the night, a white Les Paul has gleamed from stage right, like the revolver on the wall in a Chekhov play. You know it’s eventually going to make a sound and suddenly Joe Jordan is there, seemingly in his own world, caressing the guitar and manipulating his pedals. Around him, a funk groove emerges, led by the crack of Crudup’s snare, before Moor Mother again brings everything to a halt.
In the empty space, Jordan starts to shred, but with feeling, blazing lines erupting to be looped and fired off like ray guns, the drummers joining in and giving as good as they get. Jordan’s 16th note runs grow increasingly tangled and electronic, like Hendrix on Come On (Part 1), aided by the rack of effects pedals. The sound changes and laser-like licks break through, not unlike Mick Ronson on Moonage Daydream.
The full company returns, rattling paper, causing a sound that hovers between unrest and applause. A loose call and response between Moor Mother and everyone else ensues, somehow perfect in its ragged edges.
A funky brew stars up. “Didn’t it rain? Didn’t it rain my children? Didn’t it rain for us?” the vocalists repeat in homage to Sister Rosetta Tharp.
Just when the bliss almost becomes too strong, Moor Mother puts up two hands and it all comes to a halt. After a brief almost audible sigh from the audience, rapturous applause. Moor Mother and the ensemble soak it in, but only briefly. Apparently there’s more: “We have one more for you,” Moor Mother says, “something very special.”
It turns out to be Summertime, the Gershwin/Heyward standard, impeccably sung by Kidd. At first its indelible melody is unchallenged by the bits of percussion and other music that begins to arise. Moor Mother starts to preach, the music begins to swirl harder, and it becomes all hers. Once it’s perfectly clear that her ownership is complete, she makes a gesture of supplication to the musicians, slowing things down a bit and returning it to Gershwin and Heyward, if only briefly. The concert is over.
We head out into the night, the voice and vision of Moor Mother reverberating in our heads. Didn’t it rain, indeed.
Note: New Sounds recorded the event for future broadcast. I’ll let you know when it airs!
From the archives:
Best Of 2022: Hip Hop, R&B, and Reggae
Record Roundup: Evocative Voices
Best Of 2021: Hip Hop, R&B, and Reggae
Best Of 2021: Jazz, Latin & Global
Best Of 2020: Jazz, Latin & Global
Oh wow! Can’t wait to sit down with this read. I first met Moor Mother when living in Philly and was always in awe of her artistic practice.