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 a special conversation and listening session with the Philadelphia-born free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, at the Fabric Workshop & Museum on Saturday, March 28, 2026.

For this very special event, 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.

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.”

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. Josh is a two-time recipient of the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting.