'Free Love' streams ahead of the release of Irreversible Entanglements' Protect Your Light

No pressure when you sign to the label synonymous with the most mind blowing music of John Coltrane, Impulse! But that's just what US spiritual-jazz band Irreversible Entanglements have done following in the footsteps in recent years of Shabaka …

Published: 27 Jul 2023. Updated: 9 months.

No pressure when you sign to the label synonymous with the most mind blowing music of John Coltrane, Impulse! But that's just what US spiritual-jazz band Irreversible Entanglements have done following in the footsteps in recent years of Shabaka Hutchings. Cast your minds back to 2020 - certainly then it struck us listening to 'Who Sent You?' how rare that you get something truly original entering your ears. We wrote at the time that not since The Epic has something so obviously important come along. And yet this was so different in scale reaching for the philosopher's stone. Grounded in a spiritual Coltranian sense in the undertow - is it any wonder that Impulse became interested? - with spoken word poetry on top, black consciousness, meditational profundity swim here in Afrofurist quantity and the quality of the musical ideas is expressed on one level by the rapport demonstrated by newcomers to an international audience Keir Neuringer on saxophone and Aquiles Navarro on trumpet. On another, poet Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, proved a Gil Scott-Heron for our times, her words have a ringing, compelling doomsday quality to them that make you sit up, then stand up.

Playing original Afrofuturist tunes Irreversible Entanglements are the band for our times. They have the inspiration of the Art Ensemble of Chicago behind them and when the dust settles surely a sea of audiences in front of them. In 2021 Open the Gates upped the ante still further, arty with a street beat defiance when love and revolution are the key sentiments of the whole album chased down by an almost Baptist sense of radical revival, shuddering heavy religion and apocalyptic prophesy all in one primed like a timebomb. 'Six Sounds' proved a mini-masterpiece.

The band return to play London this autumn appearing at the jazz festival at Earth in Dalston on 15 November. Their first album for Impulse Protect Your Light is out before that in September and drawn from the album 'Free Love' is streaming. Protect Your Light was recorded back in January at the Rudy Van Gelder studio in New Jersey where A Love Supreme was recorded. Joining the core band of poet Camae Ayewa, bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer and drummer Tcheser Holmes are pianist Janice A. Lowe, cellist Lester St. Louis and vocalist Sovei.

Irreversible Entanglements, photo: Piper Ferguson

Tags:

Nikki Yeoh Café Oran, Crazy Coqs, London ***

A piano trio but not as you know it Jim - cello, plucked and bowed, rather than bass, a sprawl of percussion rather than conventional kit and fittingly given the unusual small group format there was a lot of beyond the blue horizon thinking too from …

Published: 27 Jul 2023. Updated: 9 months.

Next post

A piano trio but not as you know it Jim - cello, plucked and bowed, rather than bass, a sprawl of percussion rather than conventional kit and fittingly given the unusual small group format there was a lot of beyond the blue horizon thinking too from pianist Nikki Yeoh. Oh, we first heard Nikki back in the 1990s when the pianist was a member of Courtney Pine's band. Far more recently we heard her at the Barbican when Chick Corea invited her to the stage as a special guest. Here in a completely different guise all these years on with her roaming Café Oran trio Shirley Smart proved significant on cello both as a rhythmical forcefield but also capable to taking an improvising journey all on her own. Percussionist Demi Sabat Garcia steered the ship through Mediterranean waters.

And by the end of the 75-minute set he was certainly in the zone in his understated way, whether prodding a cymbal with his finger or caressing the skin of his frame drum or stoking an earthen pot to squeeze out another beat. The theme of the set was the music of French Algerian composer Maurice El Medioni, a composer suggested, Nikki told us, to her by BBC broadcaster Max Reinhardt. And there was a lot more besides in the remit of the set. And the biggest surprise was Nikki's vocal on Bob Dylan's 'Hurricane' from 1976's Desire - pistol shots may not have rung out in the Crazy Coqs night but suddenly Nikki was Patty Valentine in the lower hall. She had everyone up on their feet by the end and she even relayed a joke Django Bates trots out ''there's nothing I like less than audience participation'' as she cajoled everyone up. There was a lot of power in Nikki's interpretations of the El Medioni pieces and she roamed widely beyond the core of the pieces to show her fantastic improvisational sense of poise and purpose. SG

The word's out: Nikki Yeoh above. The trio return to the Soho club in October.