Text: Jan Paersch, 15.4.2024
The best place to start is with their longest song. It has only been released as a »single«, a strange term for a piece lasting more than twenty minutes. It opens with just drums and a nervously trotting double bass, lasting several minutes. Slowly, a saxophone and a trumpet rise up together, and things get loud and unpleasant.
Only seven minutes later does a sonorous female voice join in: »Nobody wants to be who they are«. The performer mentions a »wonderland full of illusions«, in energetic, encoded sprechgesang she laments the murky depths of social media platforms.
The wind instruments intone a rapid, monotonous theme, almost like an alarm siren, but the sound is strangely soft: they play it as if in a trance, gradually getting louder. Eleven minutes have passed when a saxophone solo starts up, fast as hell and painful, only reconnecting with the trumpet after three rushed minutes.
At some point the song comes to a standstill. The singer asks: »How far do we have to go / To get away from the hell / That’s always waiting.« The song ends as it began, with a plucked double bass.
»Homeless/Global« is a studio recording 23 minutes and 38 seconds long, longer than an episode of »Friends«, longer than many a complete punk album. A stirring political poem, set to music usually given a label that for many represents nothing but noise: free jazz.
But this verdict doesn’t do justice to the pull and force, nor to the beauty of »Homeless/Global«. In the sixties, something like this would have been called »fire music«, referencing the title of an early album by saxophonist Archie Shepp. Political, merciless music that challenges, and denounces grievances, hurting but also touching the listener. Music that doesn’t come out of nowhere. One critic mentions the band in the same breath as the »ritualistic rhythms of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the hymnal ecstasy of the late John Coltrane, the spirituality of Alice Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders, and the acoustic-electric textures of contemporary artists like Shabaka Hutchings«.
The band that stands up to such comparisons is called Irreversible Entanglements. Four men and one woman who have named themselves after a term used in physics, »irreversible quantum entanglement«: a phenomenon where several entangled particles can no longer be described individually, but only as an overall system.
The members of the quintet seem to be united almost by telepathy, and critics later hailed the group as »life-affirming and overwhelming«, but bandleader Camae Ayewa came up with the name well before that. Ayewa is a singer, poet and artist of the spoken word. »I try to make things that feel organic,« she says, »things where the energy is already there. I remember how much I wanted to make music, but I didn’t know anyone. You need friends to start a band!«
»Alles, was du hörst, kommt aus dem Moment. Meistens fangen wir einfach an und sagen: See you at the end.«
Luke Stewart, Bass
Activist from the start
The band was founded when Ayewa, sax player Keir Neuringer and bassist Luke Stewart met in Philadelphia’s hardcore experimental scene and organised grassroots campaigns. In April 2015, the three travelled to New York City together to take part in the musical demonstration »Musicians Against Police Brutality«. Immediately after their performance, a duo consisting of trumpet and drums played there – and these two musicians, Aquiles Navarro and Tcheser Holmes, with their Afro-Caribbean roots and their amazing mix of jazz, electronic music and Latin influences, provided the ideal complement to the harsh noise produced by the three musicians from Philadelphia. Irreversible Entanglements was born.
»We don’t play songs,« says bassist Luke Stewart, »we’re an improvising band. Everything you hear evolves out of the moment. Camae brings poems to the session and we discuss them. Most of the time we just start and say, ’See you at the end’.«
Irreversible Entanglements has released four albums since 2017, the most recent one for Impulse. This was the label that released »A Love Supreme« in 1964, the album by a saxophonist named John Coltrane that was soon being hailed as an all-time classic. Coltrane in the sixties primarily strove for enlightenment and sought to mould spirituality into sound (though his political leanings were mainly ascribed to him by others), whereas Irreversible Entanglements was explicitly activist from the outset. The band’s most recent album titles are energetic imperatives: »Open the Gates« and most recently »Protect Your Light«. The band describes this album, released in autumn 2023, as a »melancholic exploration of the post-colonial wreckage that surrounds us«.
There are a billion stories
When critics describe the quintet’s music, they often resort to martial vocabulary. There is talk of the »aggressive brass sections«, the »thundering bass« and the fury in Ayewa’s performances – she has been labelled the »Poet Laureate of the Apocalypse». However, the artist herself says: »I am never angry. This is love. I make music about what is important to me and what I want to share. And that means women’s stories.«
Camae Ayewa comes from the small town of Aberdeen in Maryland, some 50 miles south-west of Philadelphia. »To get away from the hell / That’s always waiting« – the omnipresent hell she describes in the song »Homeless/Global» could be the welfare housing of her childhood. But it could also refer to the incidents of racism and misogyny she is still regularly exposed to. »It’s not just one story, and it’s not just my story,« says Ayewa. »It’s a billion stories.«
She has set many of them to music as a soloist under the name Moor Mother, with pieces she describes as »Black ghost songs«. She works as a duo with her art project »Black Quantum Futurism« and with kindred spirits from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the London band Sons of Kemet, centred around saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings.
The career of their most important band, Irreversible Entanglements, is closely linked to the growing reputation of the Chicago label International Anthem, a wide-open, political label that sees jazz as an attitude, not as a leaning towards a particular sound.
Label boss Scott McNiece remembers his first Moor Mother concert: »It was inspiring to see a Black artist who was prepared to speak so directly to the conscience of a 99 per cent white audience. She attacked their complacency and comfort in a way that was uncomfortable for me as well: ›What are you looking at? What are you doing about the chaos out there?‹ A truly unforgettable performance. Then I met her after the show and she was so peaceful and loving, moving almost in slow motion. It was a stark contrast to the immediacy she showed on stage. She ticks to her own time, and she moves as fast as she wants at any given moment.«
In their current programme »Protect Your Light«, Ayewa and her fellow artists have opted to tick more slowly, though there are also long, fanfare-like intros, plaintive, New Orleans-style horns and Brazilian samba grooves. But the brusque solos, which previously seemed like the musical equivalent of the »Black Lives Matter« movement, are tamer now. And Ayewa now tells personal stories as well. On »Root – Branch«, she pays tribute to the late trumpeter and label colleague Jaimie Branch; while the song »Free Love« in turn contains the erotically charged demand »I want more love».
But for all the love they express, Irreversible Entanglements remain committed. »Homeless/Global« will not be their last song dealing with topics like migration, displacement and violence. In it, Camae Ayewa asks: »When was the last time you took a picture of a sound smiling at you?« A sound that smiles at the listener – what a poetic, meaningful image. And a tender offer to the audience from what is probably the most political band in jazz.
This article appeared in the Elbphilharmonie Magazine (2/24).
Translation: Clive Williams
- Elbphilharmonie Kleiner Saal
»Protect Your Light« – Hamburg International Music Festival
