Protect Your Light Irreversible Entanglements

• 1Free Love04:54
• 2Protect Your Light03:22
• 3Our Land Back06:17
• 4Soundness07:31
• 5root <=> branch07:31
• 6Celestial Pathways02:51
• 7Sunshine05:38
• 8Degrees of Freedom07:09
• Total Runtime45:13

Info for Protect Your Light

Fusing elements of jazz, hip-hop, global music traditions and spoken word, the new album sees the quintet (vocalist/poet Camae Ayewa, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes) break molds with adventurous improvisation driven by Ayewa’s poetry about the Black experience, love, power, community and liberation.

Primarily recorded over three days in January 2023 at the historic Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Protect Your Light is Irreversible Entanglementsʼ most accomplished work to date. Over the course of the recordʼs eight tracks the poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (oen 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. Irreversible Entanglementsʼ 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.

Protect Your Light features contributions from the greater members of Irreversible Entanglementsʼ community — pianist Janice A. Lowe, cellist Lester St. Louis and vocalist Sovei — who help illuminate the bandʼs musical dexterity and expand the breadth of its beautiful consciousness. These eight pieces were composed both individually and collectively, with some themes brand-new, and others rooted in Irreversible Entanglementsʼ spirited, wholly improvised live performances; with Ayewa adding words that elevate what she calls the bandʼs “in-communion” practices.

Irreversible Entanglements make 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 theyʼre saying it. Get to that love on time — donʼt force history to guide you.

Irreversible Entanglements

Irreversible Entanglements
are a liberation-oriented free jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Months later the group added trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes (a duo who also performed at the MAPB event) for a single day of recording at Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn, and the full quintet’s first time playing together was captured for this debut. In four relentless bouts of inspired fire music the instrumentalists explore and elaborate compositional ideas drawn from their deep individual studies of free jazz improvisation, but the tone of each piece is driven decisively by Ayewa’s searing poetic narrations of Black trauma, survival and power. The message is the undeniable essence of the music. Though free jazz with voice is an uncommon approach in the modern day landscape of the genre, the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenant of the sound as it was founded – to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As creative and adventurous as any recording of contemporary avant-garde jazz but offering listeners no abstractions to hide behind, this is music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.

This album contains no booklet.