After Protect Your Light, Future Present Past is Irreversible Entanglements’s second album on Impulse! and let’s cut to the chase: Even if it may lack the radicalism and freshness of Open The Gates and Who Sent You, Future Present Past is an outstanding album! While the free jazz moments have given way to somewhat more accessible spiritual jazz elements and Afro-Caribbean and African influences, the urgency of the music is still fully palpable. How could this project not position itself amidst the current political and cultural discourse in the U.S.? Here, too, the themes are oppression, historical trauma, and collective emancipation; the slave trade, rapid industrialization, and the hope for a better future. At the same time, you hear a technically mature band pursuing a clear concept and aiming to reach a wider audience. The band itself describes this as a moment in which “five musicians transform into billions”, thereby calling for a musical embodiment of global solidarity and the collective experience of resistance.
The band itself is often described as a free-jazz collective (even if there’s less free jazz that is still true) and still consists of poet and singer Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother), trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Here, however, the album gains even more depth through guest appearances by New York vocal artist MOTHERBOARD (Kyle Kidd) and Helado Negro, a singer with Ecuadorian roots. At the same time, this underscores the connection to other, similar projects such as the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as Future Present Past increasingly combines a percussive approach with vocals.
But what also sets this album apart from its predecessors is the more obvious influence of Charles Mingus's music. In the relentlessly driving “Panamanian Fight Song”, Irreversible Entanglements bring together all the sonic worlds explored on the album into a single piece. It’s certainly no coincidence that the title of the piece evokes Mingus’s famous “Haitian Fight Song”. Both pieces begin with a bass solo, both build to a crescendo, and both intensify before fully unfolding. But it’s primarily through the vocals and the track’s brevity that Irreversible Entanglements give the track its own direction. Mingus’s influence is also evident on “Keep Going” and “The Messenger”; brief, episodic interludes of trumpet and saxophone both support the driving, ostinato bass and the Fender Rhodes, and at the same time, with wild free-jazz interludes, they also shake up the structure of the tracks, while Moor Mother encourages her brothers and sisters to confidently continue on their path. In the penultimate track, “The Spirit Moves,” black self-empowerment is invoked against a backdrop of African rhythms as a simple, steady beat emerges from the supposed chaos: “a rhythm of us marching toward victory/no more trouble/move all the troubles away.” Here it also becomes clear that this is music that is aware of traditions, honors them, is anchored in the here and now, yet also points toward the future. Future Present Past.
Future Present Pastis available on vinyl, as a CD and as a download. You can listen to it on the usual streaming devices. Since it’s a major, you can buy it at your favorite record store.
Check out “The Messenger“ here:
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