Free Love" from Irreversible Entanglements, the Free-Jazz Quintet

Irreversible Entanglements proudly announced their signing to the legendary Impulse! label, as well as the forthcoming release of their new album, Protect Your Light, out September 8th. Additionally, they share the first single off the record, “Free Love.” The band will celebrate the release of Protect Your Light with a performance at Hudson’s Basilica SoundScape Presents festival on September 9th. “We are thrilled to welcome Irreversible Entanglements to the Impulse! Family,” says Dahlia Ambach-Caplin, SVP A&R and Artist Development at Impulse!/Verve Label Group, of the signing. “Their music is not only brilliant but also courageous and contemporary. Protect Your Light embodies so much of Impulse!’s history while also looking unassailably forward as well.”

Every once in a while, the world is blessed with a band that helps define an era. Its sound, purpose and energy speaks directly to the cultural moment. Its individual members mirror the community’s identities, perspectives and aspirations; and collectively, the group forms a supernova, a sign of how we might get to the future — its music, in fact, already spelling aspects of that future out. Usually, it is history that cements the names of these bands in the books, but occasionally we’re capable of glimpsing their majesty unfurl in real time. 

In 2023, that band is Irreversible Entanglements (IE), the free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality. And Protect Your Light is the kind of artistic and social statement that simultaneously plugs into and tweaks the zeitgeist. Over the course of the record’s eight tracks the poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (often known as Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes unite to deliver an unconditional statement of intent and rhythm. IE’s improvisations are molded in the fire of the moment, while its songs are born in experience, where music and life are one and the same. There is no one remotely like them on the planet, and no recent album like this one.

Primarily recorded over three days in January 2023 at the historic Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Protect Your Light is the band’s most accomplished work to date, surpassing even the three already-classic records they cut for Chicago’s International Anthem. PYL features contributions from the greater members of IE’s community — pianist Janice A. Lowe, cellist Lester St. Louis and vocalist Sovei — who help illuminate the band’s musical dexterity and expand the breadth of its beautiful consciousness. The eight pieces were composed both individually and collectively, with some themes brand-new, and others rooted in IE’s spirited, wholly improvised live performances; with Ayewa adding words that elevate what she calls the band’s “in-communion” practices. Navarro is the primary force behind the groove of first single “Free Love,” which is heavy with the Panama-raised trumpeter’s fanfares, and with declarations of what the band calls a “universal message that provokes unity through a love that lives free, the love that lives in you.” That’s why Irreversible Entanglements makes the world feel blessed again. What defines this band, the beauty of Protect Your Light, and its representation of the moment, is a love of the people, of the Black musical tradition, of each other, and of playing it like they’re saying it. Get to that love on time — don’t force history to guide you.