Philadelphia/NY/DC free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements’ forthcoming third full length album ‘Open The Gates’ was recorded in a single day at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, on January 5th, 2021. Across 73 minutes of music, stretched out more than ever (their first double LP length album), the group supplement their raw, organic punk-jazz sound with first-time experiments with electronics and synthesizers.
Last month the band released the title track and a music video for “Open The Gates,” and more recently the single “Lágrimas del Mar” both of which receiving praise from Pitchfork, NPR, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, and more.
As described in the liner notes written by Alex Smith, the album is
ethereal shards of jagged onyx, a melancholic exploration of the post-colonial debris that surrounds us.
New single, “Storm Came Twice”, impacting November 17th, features harmonically free, rhythmically fractured Strata East-echoing horn heads which build up into a wailing saxophone solo from Neuringer.
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.
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.
IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS LIVE DATES:
Nov 6th – Rotterdam NL – BIRD Fest
Nov 7th – Wels AT – Music Unlimited
Nov 8th – Heidelberg DE – Enjoy Jazz Festival
Nov 9th – Berlin DE – Silent Green
Nov 11th – Utrecht NL – Le Guess Who?
Nov 13th – London UK – London Jazz Festival