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Irreversible Entanglements (IE) is a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality, that consists of poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (often known as Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. It is a community band playing deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment. IE came together spontaneously, organically, in April of 2015 at “Musicians Against Police Brutality,” a day of protest sound and discussion in Brooklyn. All were artists and activists of varying degrees: Philadelphia-based Ayewa and Neuringer, and D.C.-based Stewart as veterans of the Mid-Atlantic noise-hardcore-experimental scene, while Holmes and Navarro as recent New England Conservatory grads. The trio and the duo played back-to-back, and found their sounds deeply compatible. A few months later, the quintet went into the studio to confirm what they’d already suspected, and Irreversible Entanglements’ self-titled 2017 debut (co-released by Chicago’s then-upstart jazz label International Anthem, and Philly’s experimental punk imprint, Don Giovanni) instantly established the band as a new force of consciousness in group free mprovisation. Each of the studio albums that followed — 2020’s Who Sent You? And 2021’s Open The Gates — developed this legend further. IE’s legend was greatly elevated by each incendiary live performances that followed, almost instantly pushing the group from the clubs to international festival stages. In 2023, IE signed to the fabled Impulse! Records, and released its most accomplished work to date, Protect Your Light, primarily recorded at New Jersey’s historic Van Gelder Studios. It features eight examples of how IE’s collaborative composition strategies and Ayewa’s in-communion verses result in some of the most potent music being made in the third decade of the 21st century, music with communal light and love at its heart. Get to that love on time — don’t force history to guide you.
