"It's something that is an integral part of our work, a constant practice, dreaming, speculating and imagining the future within our community," describes poet Camae Ayewa in an interview with Paste Magazine. One of the founding members of the Philadelphia-based free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, last year's collaboration with legendary jazz label Impulse! has placed the group among the genre's leading figures such as Alice and John Coltrane and Pharaoah Sanders. Despite their successes, the quintet of Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), drummer Tcheser Holmes, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer and bassist Luke Stewart don't forget their DIY roots on their latest record, Protect Your Light, which heralds a self-reflexive turnaround.
This was three years after the movement against police brutality and racially motivated violence against African Americans was in full swing in the United States. Shortly after the death of a young Akai Gurley in 2015, a protest concert, Musicians Against Police Brutality, was held at the now-shuttered DIY space Silent Barn, where, coincidentally, members of the future Irreversible Entanglements met. Two years later, in one day, they recorded an eponymous album that was hailed by critics as not only the album of the year, but one of the best of the decade. They were able to repeat similar success with Who Sent You? (2020) and Open the Gates (2021), which have received comparisons to the works of the New York Art Quartet and Sun Ra Arkestra from outlets such as The Wire, The Quietus, and NPR.
Read moreTheir improvised, confrontational way of playing in conjunction with the spoken word is devoid of any abstraction, opting instead for a form of clear, ritualistic appeal full of anger. Themes of racism, gentrification, capitalism, and care for community have caused the Irreversible Entanglements to establish themselves as a protest music collective that continually subjects the question of African American existence and memory to revision, and seeks to incite new forms of Afrofuturism, to which Ayewa herself readily subscribes.
The fourth album Protect Your Light is the official end of the collaboration with the independent label International Anthem and at the same time an effort to highlight the importance of the individual and his future within the decaying political reality. In the context of Irreversible Entanglements' career to date, this is a stylistic shift that does not abandon its original political starting points, but seeks to experiment with a new, more ordered form and more subtle rhetoric.