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1218 Cartwright St, Vancouver, BC V6H 3R8

A free jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality, Irreversible Entanglements is “the most thrilling band in jazz right now” (NPR). Driven by poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa’s (aka Moor Mother) searing narrations of Black trauma, survival, and power, Irreversible Entanglements brings first-wave free jazz’s tradition of resistance acutely into the now. This is deeply improvised rhythm music full of love, protest, and social commitment; IE are honouring the past, speaking to the present, and making sonic claims on the future. Featuring bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, and drummer Tcheser Holmes, their new album Protect Your Light — on the legendary Impulse! Label — is “a major statement from artists who are as much the new wave of jazz as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp et al were in their day.” – The Wire

IE came together spontaneously, organically, in April of 2015 at Musicians Against Police Brutality, a day of protest sound and discussion in Brooklyn. All were artists and activists of varying degrees: Philadelphia-based Ayewa and Neuringer, and D.C.-based Stewart as veterans of the Mid-Atlantic noise-hardcore-experimental scene, while Holmes and Navarro as recent New England Conservatory grads. The studio albums that followed—2020’s Who Sent You? and 2021’s Open The Gates—developed this legend further.

In 2023, IE signed to Impulse! Records and released its most accomplished work to date, Protect Your Light, primarily recorded at New Jersey’s historic Van Gelder Studios. It features eight examples of how IE’s collaborative composition strategies and Ayewa’s in-communion verses result in some of the most potent music being made in the now, music with communal light and love at its heart. 

No refunds.