An avant-garde historical protest album from Irreversible Entanglements poet and spiritual inspiration Moor Mother. It's a bit patchy and scattershot. However, where The Great Bailout does succeed is in its quality of hard hitting critique and forensic observation. Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa)'s best albums to date are still Circuit City (2020) and Jazz Codes (2022). This isn't quite as successful as either, however, in tackling the subject of colonialism and the subject of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire as legislated by the 1833 Act of Abolition in focus that as a consequence of which slave owners were compensated - ''bailed out'' - for their loss. But slaves and their descendants were perversely not. As a radical statement it is certainly powerful. Best track is 'Death By Longitude'. But for poetry as protest in a jazz context we recommend instead Anthony Joseph's The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives released in 2021 because that has a tighter focus and shape and Joseph, just like Moor Mother, does not shrink from delivering any number of inconvenient, to some, but urgently significant nevertheless, truths.
Tags: reviews