“I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies.”
– Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother)
Moor Mother (Photo: Ebru Yildiz)
Experience Moor Mother's The Great Bailout on September 14 at the Walker Art Center, presented in partnership with Liquid Music. Find your tickets here.
An excerpted conversation between Camae Ayewa and her collaborator Brandon Stosuy, published in full at walkerart.org:
Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, is a poet, visual artist, touring musician, and professor of Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
Her recent large-scale work, The Great Bailout, uses as its starting point the United Kingdom’s 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which gave tax bailouts to former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people. The resulting unwavering sonic meditation—dark, powerful, deeply political and personal—is a nonlinear word map that charts connections across colonialism, slavery, and commerce in Great Britain, along with its modern parallels in the United States.
Ayewa released The Great Bailout as a proper album in March of 2024. It was followed a few months later by an expanded edition, which included earlier versions of the pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The upcoming site-specific Walker performance of The Great Bailout is the first large-scale presentation of the project in the United States.
Brandon Stosuy: I’ve seen you perform dozens of times, and you never do the same show twice. Over the years, as you’ve worked more with classical music and in large-scale institutions like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, your live performances have grown more ambitious, with additional collaborators and variables.
When people perform the same set over and over, it offers a bit of a safety net, but you keep experimenting. What is it that inspires you to approach live performance this way?
Camae Ayewa: I love the concept of reworking: that the music continues to breathe, the music continues to live, and in different situations, the music continues to grow. That’s important to me. I never want to stay locked into the sounds. The sounds continue to migrate, they continue to grow—they continue to have their own life, shall I say. And it’s my job or my passion to keep finding new ways to approach the work, but also new ways for the work to still be grounded in the present. And that’s what’s really interesting to me.
My writing style is about leaving space for the unknown and for the stories of the present moment. I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies. It is important to bring out all the layers, present all the layers, as if it was an infinity mirror that continues to shine light, that continues to reflect.
BS: The Great Bailout, the basis for your performance at the Walker: Can you give a bit of background on it?
CA: The project came about when I was commissioned by the Tusk Festival in England to present a work with an orchestra and to create a theme. At that moment, when I was thinking what I could do, I felt it was imperative to focus on a historical moment that still has its residue, or remnants, here in the present. This was, of course, a risky move, to put this type of work out there, but I felt that we had to honor the creative mind and honor all the things that have happened on this planet, really. To dwell into that and close the timeline.
BS: This is the first full-scale performance of The Great Bailout in the U.S. How did you arrive at the approach for the Walker performance?
CA: My approach was to pick the right ingredients…
Follow Moor Mother:
Website: moormother.net
Instagram: @moormother (instagram.com/moormother)
Facebook: facebook.com/MoorMother
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