LONNIE HOLLEY & MOOR MOTHER & IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS AT MONA FOMA, 24/2/2024

The MONA FOMA summer series of concerts has succumbed to the economic pressures terminating many Australian music festivals. Although Dark Mofo remains to enliven the Tasmanian winter months, it’s lamentable to see the cessation of a program that had the advantage of a balmier season for outdoor performances on the Museum of Old and New Art’s spacious Berriedale lawns. Since its inception in 2009, organiser Brian Ritchie made it his mission to entice Hobart’s residents with an eclectic range of experimental artists such as Philip Glass, David Byrne, Ryoji Ikeda, Julia Holter, Pierre Henry, Tyondai Braxton, Mdou Moctar, John Cale, PJ Harvey, and Antony Pateras, among many others. The inclusion of renowned American free jazz and poetry group Irreversible Entanglements for the second last show is a fitting summation of the institution’s cultural ambition. While this penultimate concert has its languorous moments, the febrile Fire Music energy on display for at least two-thirds of its length inspires hope that one day MONA can revive the MF program to host a return performance.

The Irreversible Entanglements line up of vocalist Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), drummer Tcheser Holmes, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and bassist Luke Stewart has been augmented for this concert with outsider artist and musician Lonnie Holley on vocals and keyboards, and Lee Bains on guitar. Holley plays such a prominent role that it is almost his group for this show with Ayewa providing a supporting role, her exhortations that of an MC or akin to June Tyson’s declamations in the Sun Ra Arkestra. The egoless elasticity of this outfit enables them to readily incorporate their collaborators’ practices, and vice versa. Bains’ minimal comping sometimes plays a strong role in directing the music’s course, but he’s just as ready to sculpt his lines around others’ contributions. The set has the character at times of an extended medley or suite that recalls the open-ended formal melts of Miles Davis’ 70s groups or Cecil Taylor’s organic processes. Navarro’s and Neuringer’s use of synthesizers for timbral smears likewise resembles Miles’ dalliance with Stockhausen’s Darmstadt School electronics during his fusion period.

The set begins in a hushed manner with Holley’s chorused electric piano unleashing glistening tones into the night air. His recitation emerges into what could be a version of ‘I Snuck Off the Slave Ship’ from his 2018 album Mith with the repetition of the line “They shipped us away.” The band’s sympathetic, probing support for Holley’s evocations of the terrible misadventures of the Middle Passage gradually builds to a dramatic climax, setting a pattern that continues into the next piece. There’s an inexorable flow of suggestion and emphasis from an amorphous bluesy climate surrounding Lonnie’s keening refrain “What did I do wrong?” into a country gospel passage, replete with Dixieland phrasing from Avarro, that Stewart and Holmes give a righteous swing. The playing harks back to Albert Ayler’s mission to use the expanded parameters of the New Music to reinvigorate the church’s musical traditions. A fitting spiritual uplift runs in contradiction to the apocalyptic message of the refrain “Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide?” Lonnie’s railings against humanity’s addiction to the “cold titty momma” of digital technology inspires a freeform hellstorm that seems to blow in out of nowhere, recalling John Coltrane’s Ascension or Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra’s more primordial blowouts. Mysterious lateral connections have Holley unleashing “terror bytes” of information to bite the “digital babies”, summoning the more lurid dimensions of George Clinton or Kool Keith’s Afrofuturist fantasies. Aweya’s repetition of the line “Do it to me before I do it to myself” furthers the abjection of the technology-addiction nexus. The ensemble playing and lyrical imagery recall the dark energy of dystopian jazz rants out of Deeper-era Copernicus. Contrastingly, low-key percussion-dominated intervals between (or within) songs are reminiscent of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Afrocentric ceremonials and conjure a curative ritual vibe.

Holley returns to take the encore while the rest of the group sit out, and it suffers as a result; a somewhat unfocused improvisation compared to his commanding stewardship of the first half of the set. Nevertheless, IE have already filled some fifty minutes of a Hobart evening with an exploratory, prescient blend of jazz and poetry that’s second to none.

Ayewa uses the term ‘liberation technology’ in elucidating Irreversible Entanglements’ musical and spiritual aims. Her references to quantum physics as a scientific hub of emancipatory transformation suggest a natural link in the group’s name with the theory of quantum entanglement. The notion of entanglement in quantum mechanics refers to energetic states where electrons or photons become indefinite and indivisibly linked despite their separation across time and space. The networking and bonding of various jazz traditions in IE’s sound regardless of original spatial and temporal contexts speaks to the genre’s capacity for perpetual reinvention, but also to a current of inspiration where political and social struggles of the past continue to motivate activism in the present. Bassist Luke Stewart in an interview with The Wire’s Phil Freeman spoke of seeing the group's connection with the heritage of 60s free jazz contained in the Van Gelder studio where sections of IE's fourth album Protect Your Light was recorded as "a look into a potential future, rather than a link to the past." The improvisatory present contains all potencies, creative and political, past and future, and Moor Mother’s closing chant of “Freedom now!” reminds us of our obligations to the possible.