Her Musical Galaxy Grows Even Bigger
The poet and musician Camae Ayewa is a study in nonstop movement. On a recent video call from Los Angeles, she chatted while pacing her apartment. “When people hang out with me, we’re not going to be just sitting down and talking the whole time,” she said. “I like creating. It’s my energy.”
Ms. Ayewa is an accomplished multitasker. Over the past five years, she has released a blend of hip-hop, spoken-word poetry, punk and electro under the name Moor Mother, a handful of critically acclaimed solo LPs, three as a member of the free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements, and a joint rap record with Billy Woods. She has turned up musing with the British jazz troupe Sons of Kemet, performing with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and onstage with the pianist Vijay Iyer.
“I meet people, then we form some sort of kinship and then something works out,” Ms. Ayewa said. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, forced her to tap into a different well for her album, “Black Encyclopedia of the Air,” released in September. Without the faceto-face interaction she prefers, she started working on the album alone in the spring of 2020 to explore traditional hip-hop.
Largely produced by Olof Melander (whose beats blend free jazz and electronica), and featuring the rappers maassai, Nappy Nina, Lojii and Pink Siifu, Ms. Ayewa’s album is one of her most straightforward. “Like most people on the East Coast, I started going into this depression,” she said. (She spent most of the pandemic in Philadelphia.) “So I would listen to this album, and it became a healing process as I’m working on other things.”
The majority of the Moor Mother catalog is, in a word, intense. Take “The Myth Hold Weight,” from her 2016 album “Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes.” “We want our money back/printed on fresh cotton and a glass of blood from the Confederate fountain/that run through the Blue Ridge Mountains,” she speaks over a track of bleeps and bloops. It can sometimes seem like Ms. Ayewa inhabits her own universe.
Some of Ms. Ayewa’s earliest musical memories include listening to gospel as a child growing up in Aberdeen, Maryland. Her father sang in the church choir and she eventually followed, until she quit to start practicing taekwondo.
When Ms. Ayewa moved to Philadelphia to study photography at the Art Institute, she started a rap duo with her best friend, Rebecca Roe, called the Mighty Paradocs, that soon morphed into a punk band with political lyrics and brash instrumentation. That led to a monthly concert series called Rockers!, a spot for like-minded musicians who made esoteric art that did not fit into a particular space. The shows ran for more than a decade. Along the way, Ms. Ayewa started or was a part of a number of bands or collectives: Girls Dressed as Girls, a punk band; Black Quantum Futurism, a multidisciplinary duo with the author Rasheedah Phillips.
In 2015, Ms. Ayewa joined the saxophonist Keir Neuringer and the bassist Luke Stewart to play the Musicians Against Police Brutality rally in East New York. They met the trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and the drummer Tcheser Holmes there, and soon entered a recording studio as a group. The resulting album, “Irreversible Entanglements” (also the name of the project), was a combative free jazz set that scolded police, racism, capitalism and politics.
The LP arrived in 2017 amid heightened awareness surrounding the deaths of unarmed Black people. Ms. Ayewa’s lyrics pulled no punches. “She brings the intensity in her vocal delivery on a bare bones musicality level,” Mr. Stewart said. “The sound and timbre of
her voice lends itself well to this sort of situation. Watching her movements as an artist and community organizer, I think she is coming from a very profound place.”
The collective’s third album, “Open the Gates,” was released on November 12. While it has all the fire of its first two releases, it is meant to forge a way forward from the rage. Ms. Ayewa had been studying books on Tai Chi and decided to carry the practice into her writing for the group’s new record. “We walked in with the intention of a meditation,” she said.
As for her own album, “Black Encyclopedia of the Air,” Ms. Ayewa said it was time to come down to earth a little bit, to put forth a more direct project that did not sacrifice complexity. “I want it to be accessible so you can play it when you’re hanging out with your mom or little sister,” she said. “You can still get the message but it’s not over your head, you know? The feelings are still there.”