Matana Roberts

Self-described as a “liberation-minded free jazz collective”, Irreversible Entanglements will bring their powerful mix of free jazz and expressive poetry to the Barbican’s music programme for the first time in February 2019. The quintet features poet Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother (voice), Keir Neuringer (sax), Aquiles Navarro (trumpet), Luke Stewart (bass) and Tcheser Holmes (drums). Their set will include bouts of inspired fire music – the strain of avant-garde protest jazz that flourished in the ’60s and early ’70s – during which the instrumentalists explore and elaborate compositional ideas drawn from their deep individual studies of free jazz improvisation. The tone of each piece however is driven by Ayewa’s fiery poetic narrations of Black trauma, survival and power. Irreversible Entanglements were formed in 2015 by Ayewa, Neuringer and Stewart to play at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event in NYC in early 2015, beginning as a trio and expanding to a five-piece for recording at Brooklyn’s Seizure’s Palace in August of that same year, which resulted in their self-titled debut album Irreversible Entanglements (International Anthem, 2017).