In conjunction with The Living Temple, the ongoing exhibition celebrating the life and work of Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry, Ars Nova Workshop presents the Philadelphia-born free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, exploring the ecstatic music of Don Cherry’s groundbreaking Organic Music Society at Solar Myth on Saturday, March 28, 2026.
Irreversible Entanglements are a liberation-oriented free jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Months later the group added trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Though free jazz with voice is an uncommon approach in the modern day landscape of the genre, the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenant of the sound as it was founded – to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote in the Chicago Reader, “Irreversible Entanglements will leave you shaken.”
For this special performance, the band will explore the pioneering music of Don Cherry’s landmark 1972 double album Organic Music Society. The recording, which presaged the “world music” movement and its fusion of global traditions with jazz, was an outgrowth of the community of like-minded musicians that Don and Moki Cherry convened in the town of Tågarp, Sweden. Writing for Dusted, Dan Ruccia hails the album as nothing less than “the sound of utopia, of equality, of the universal egalitarian dream, of the earth, the water, and the life force in all its various guises.”