Artist Talk

An Organic Music Society listening session with Irreversible Entanglements and WRTI

March 28, 2026
11:00 am to 12:00 pm

An album jacket spread that features a colorful illustration of an idyllic scene that centers a goddess on an elephant. Also seen between two large trees on a grassy landscape are other goddesses and musicians playing music in harmony with nature.
Don Cherry. Organic Music Society, 1972. 2xLP (Caprice RIKS LP 50). Installation view, The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry. Courtesy of Mark Christman. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

Ars Nova Workshop presents a special conversation and listening session with the Philadelphia-born free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements. The band will explore the pioneering music of Don Cherry’s landmark 1972 double album Organic Music Society in conversation with WRTI’s Josh Jackson.

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.

Organized in conjunction with The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry.

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Event Information

March 28, 2026
11:00 am to 12:00 pm

The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Harry I. Feldman Forum, First Floor

Free | Suggested $10 donation
Advance registration encouraged

Register

About the Participants

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.”

Learn more at irreversibleentanglements.com

Josh Jackson is the associate general manager for programming and content at WRTI. He began his radio career at WWOZ in New Orleans, worked as a production assistant at American Routes, and moved to New York City to become the associate producer of Jazz From Lincoln Center with Ed Bradley. Josh was formerly the vice president of content at WBGO and the program director of Virginia’s statewide network of NPR news and music stations. He was the founding producer of the multi-platform concert series Live at the Village Vanguard and The Checkout: Live, a concert experience for the hourly music magazine he created, The Checkout. His efforts in multimedia production led to the creation of NPR’s Jazz Night in America. At WRTI, he was the producing partner with JazzDanmark for the 2021 Dangerous Sounds podcast. Josh is a two-time recipient of the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting. He came to WRTI from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia and now lives in the less elevated region of Mt. Airy in Philadelphia, where he listens to vinyl records and makes radio shows in his basement.

Hear Josh as host of Friday Mixtape.

Support

Presented in partnership with Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI-FM.