Photo by Piper Ferguson

With their 2021 breakthrough full-length, Open the Gates, Irreversible Entanglements – the experimental jazz collective featuring Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, drummer Tcheser Holmes, and bassist Luke Stewart – exploded the free-born elements of their sound to create a sonic diagram of the universe’s energy moving through the human experience. It felt as massive as the cosmos. “Free Love”, the first preview from the band’s fourth full-length effort, Protect Your Light, is as unhindered by boundaries as anything the multi-instrumental, multi-talented group has ventured to create, but there is a concentrated focus on those two words in its title in a micro sense that in turn channels that same big bang energy through the individual, with a mosaic of airborne brass, ground-bending ebbs of rhythm and percussion, and Ayewa’s poetry lifting spirit upward. “Sweet honey / Sticky sweet / You are love / More love.” When all sound settles on her final breath, inner peace is illuminated.

Irreversible Entanglments’ Protect Your Light will be released September 8th on Impulse! Records.