Poet, musician, professor, and visionary Camae Ayewa a.k.a. Moor Mother has announced her latest album Jazz Codes with the single "Woody Shaw" featuring Melanie Charles. Arriving July 1, this will be her second album on ANTI- Records following last year's Black Encyclopedia of the Air. The new single also comes with a video directed by Cyrus Moussavi that was filmed at the Leimert Park headquarters of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, which was founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott with the mission of nourishing a community orchestra dedicated to Black music in South Central LA. This first single is named after the jazz innovator and trumpet virtuoso Woody Shaw.
The single is a flurry of spaceship synth bleeps, along with xylophone, saxophone, and clattering drums. Soulful vocals gearshift into the urgent spoken delivery from Ayewa: "Life got us going up and down," she repeats. She then asks, "Who's coming?" With every delivery, Ayewa carries the flexibility and disarray of this world, its words, its paths. "Life got us confused," she proclaims later on.
Jazz Codes was inspired by a book of poems with the same name, written to honor jazz and blues icons such as Shaw, Amina Claudine Myers, and Mary Lou Williams. “It’s poetry that drives this album,” Ayewa said about the project. “The stories of these artists and countless others not named but felt—is the leading motivation. I wanted to honor and give offerings, hold them in my body, dream with them, send sweetness.”
Watch the video for "Woody Shaw" below, and pre-order Jazz Codes here.
