Irreversible Entanglements’s debut album was originally released in September 2017, and features the first music ever played together by the freshly assembled Philly/NY/DC-based quintet of poet Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. The explosive collection of improvised free-jazz with spoken word accompaniment was born after the group's initial meeting at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event (organized by musicians/comrades Amirtha Kidambi and Peter Evans following the state-sponsored killing of Akai Gurley).
As the original press release puts it: “the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenet of the free jazz sound as it was founded—to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As creative and adventurous as any recording of contemporary avant-garde jazz but offering listeners no abstractions to hide behind, this is music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.”
It’s that balance of honor and defiance that is so palpable in this early music of Irreversible Entanglements which, despite its system-shocking effect, sits squarely in the lineage of East Coast free jazz (often echoing the mid-1960s work of The New York Art Quartet and Amiri Baraka, among others). That line can be traced through all of the band’s recordings, including 2020's Who Sent You? and 2021's Open The Gates, both via International Anthem, and their 2023 album Protect Your Light (released by Impulse!). Now ten years on from their first collective sound captured for this self-titled debut, it’s clear that Irreversible Entanglements's intensity of spirit and purity of purpose influenced our label as much as it did its own community.
