Together We Win: The Core of Revolution
The opening track surrounds me. Whispers and chants pull me in [soft bells cut through]. The world speeds up, I am tantalised and enveloped. Familiar rhythms pair with wind instruments. Fade.
A sexy funky lesson teaching: ORGANISE UNITE RESIST. The saxophone makes it all okay, the pain of land taken, as does the jazz quintet funk dance sounds. The gods will punish!
Don’t
Lose
Your Head
Meet Irreversible Entanglements: sounds are projected from trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, double bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Verbally, Moor Mother is the channel for all that the music is communicating; her prose is entrancing, enriching, uplifting.
Take me higher - we vibrate higher - higher.
This track absolutely splits me down the middle, spearheaded by words spoken with such power. The lessons being taught haven’t stopped. There’s no looking back, no listening to delusions, jealousy or bitterness.
We are higher than that. We don’t want to hear you.
Is Moor Mother speaking for me? Or am I being spoken to?
This is free jazz at its best; wails, cries, beats, every sound exactly where it needs to be, and yet unpredictable and unplanned.
The weight of this album rests heavy; they are always plotting against us, they will take all that is good away from us, they are just in it for themselves.
With that direct, confrontational and sobering realisation, the first half of the Future Present Past gives way as the free-flow jazz quintet is able to fully unleash [ORGANISE]. Having galvanised their audience, the intimacy of common ground [UNITE] allows for Irreversible Entanglements to be their truest selves. Without pattern or shape, the album cements you as complicit in its journey, in its’ freedom. This is defiance. This is peace. This is freedom. [RESIST] Empathy and empowerment create a space for all who have gripes, for all for whom music is the answer, you and me.
Rhythms and chants send me out just as they brought me in.
Closing track We Will Overcome’s airy and industrial percussion keeps me surrounded by people, by sound, by drive.
Messy, human, I find myself hanging on to every beat: I am a part of it all.
Words by Orion Wheatland