Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light

If ever there was a band which screamed to be taken up by Impulse! (or Strata-East back in the day), it is the semi-free agit-jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements. Now, after three albums with the on-song but tiny International Anthem label, it has happened and, hopefully, greater exposure and recognition will follow.

IE came together in 2015 when poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother), saxophonist Keir Neuringer and bassist Luke Stewart took part in a Musicians Against Police Brutality demonstration against the NYPD. A few months later, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes joined the band. In 2023, the lineup remains unchanged.

Actually, to call IE agit-jazz is to invite misperception. But that is the way the band chose to be described in the liner notes for Protect Your Light's most recent predecessor, Open The Gates (International Anthem, 2021, reviewed here). Maybe it is a US thing. But in the UK, agit-jazz suggests the trite, ephemeral sloganeering that characterizes much so-called protest music. The value of that kind of lyric is slight, for it does not educate or expand consciousness and with every iteration its impact is diminished and the listener's attention wanders.

What gives rebellious lyrics impact and staying power is the degree of poetry within them. Fela Kuti's lyrics had poetry by the truck load, which is one reason why 26 years after his passing his audience continues to grow. Ayewa's lyrics are poetic, too. Repeated listening reveals new perspectives. This is not, perhaps, so evident on the opening track and first single, "Free Love" (see the YouTube below), which is pretty straightforward.

No argument, though, with the wordage which accompanies Protect Your Light. Avoiding "agit-jazz," it describes IE's work as "music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future." The eight pieces on the album address both oppressors and oppressed through a sequence of lamentations, rallying cries and battle hymns. Like Kuti's music, IE's is as much an exhortation to the put upon to seize the time as it is a denunciation of injustice and exploitation.

IE is a semi-free band in the same way that London tenor saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd's band Binker & Moses is semi-free. There is a jumping-off point for each piece, a bass ostinato or drum rhythm or horn motif, from which the instrumental aspect develops. Stewart and Holmes provide an insistent pulse, Navarro and Neuringer add more or less harmolodic counterpoints. Indeed, comparisons with Ornette Coleman's quartet with Don Cherry frequently suggest themselves.