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Who Sent You?

Having fallen for the late, lamented Jaimie Branch's wonderful album Fly or Die II, I wondered if there might be anything else on the same label - International Anthem - that I'd also enjoy. Via YouTube I began listening to Irreversible Entanglements, and, while the music was a little freer than I typically take my jazz, I was hooked by the video for the track 'No Más', and had soon acquired the Who Sent You? album on CD.

Irreversible Entanglements are a quintet with four instrumentalists (Keir Neuringer - saxophone; Aquiles Navarro - trumpet; Luke Stewart - bass; Tcheser Holmes - drums) and a vocalist (Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother). Ayewa recites rather than sings her words, yet the rhythmic quality of her delivery enhances the music as well as providing the message. Who Sent You? released in 2020, is their second album.

There are five tracks over the disc's forty-three minutes. The first half of the second number, which gives the album its name, is another highlight, with Ayewa channeling suspicion, fear & scorn at a dangerously antagonistic police force. Damon Locks' montage-style cover art is well-chosen & feels apt; Alex Smith's liner notes are on the pretentious side - but then how would one try to express the mercurial spirit of the words & music here into a few paragraphs of plain prose?

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