Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) uses music to express the pain, injustice and trauma inflicted by slavery, the scars of which seem even more apparent today. The word “Haiti” is not pronounced by the free-jazz/experimental poet and composer on her ninth solo album, but it is placed alongside Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, while Moor Mother recalls the crimes of Queen Victoria, a speech echoing that given by the British jazz quartet Sons of Kemet on their powerful album Your Queen is a Reptile (2018). It is a historical and social documentary, this album, which revisits African-American musical traditions to dress them in hip-hop, jazz, electronic music, but often revealing melodic motifs which bring the listener back to the ground. more comfortable – this is the case from the opening, ten minutes of experimental soul on which we find the voice, charged with emotion, of Lonnie Smith.
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