IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS are a band who cultivate the liberation technologies of jazz and associated Black music—root, stem, and branch—into the future. The band emerged organically, out of deep friendships, mutual admiration, ad hoc formations, and a shared activist concern for the beloved legacy of all Black life and culture. International in scope yet indebted to, influenced by, and committed to their specific communities, the band pulls zero punches and reserves no energy in intrepid live sets that proclaim revolutionary love for the people.
The Philadelphia, New York, and DC-based band is made up of five individuals whose uncompromising artistic visions have received wide acclaim. Poet Camae Ayewa, a/k/a Moor Mother, is a legendarily prolific, globally leading light of Afrofuturist music, art, and community activism. Bassist Luke Stewart is deservedly his generation’s most in-demand musician on that instrument, who from his work as a radio and concert presenter boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the music from which he draws with focused and thunderous intensity. Saxophonist Keir Neuringer’s prodigious avantgarde technique is matched by an urgency in his tone and fierce socio-political determination. Trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes joined the band as an already long-standing duo, bringing with them uncontainable energy and inventiveness grounded in classic jazz and Latin and Afro-Carribbean streams.
Their 2017 self-titled debut Irreversible Entanglements – which was recorded in a single session, the first time the five musicians all played together – arrived to wide critical acclaim, hailed by many as one of the Best Albums of 2017 including NPR, Wire Magazine, and Stereogum.
Quickly they made their mark at major festivals and venues in North America and Europe (including Washington’s Smithsonian, Utrecht NL’s Le Guess Who?, London’s Barbican, and Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival, and more), leaving audiences stunned by the their longform telepathic improvisational flights of rare power.
In 2020, their follow-up album Who Sent You? was released amidst the early weeks of the pandemic but was nevertheless met again with wide critical praise and an appearance near the top of the Billboard Contemporary Jazz charts. In The Nation, writer Marcus J. Moore said: “Irreversible Entanglements’ fearless music takes to task the police, American politics, capitalism, and racism.” Writer Andy Beta said, in his review for Pitchfork: “the jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface.”
Their third album, the double LP Open The Gates, arrives in the fall of 2021 with an expanded sonic palette and increased emotional breadth. All three albums are co-releases on the International Anthem and Don Giovanni labels, highlighting Irreversible Entanglements’ ability to make adventurous music beyond genre, both honoring and defying tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.