Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes

Heritage of the Invisible II

OUT TODAY

Telepathic Afro-Caribbean improvisational trumpet-and-percussion duo Aquiles Navarro and Tcheser Holmes are longtime friends, collaborators, and tireless hustlers on the creative music scenes of New York City. We came to know these brilliant players via their work in the mighty free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements; and after several years of growing steadily fonder of the sounds they make, we are pleased to share that their new duo album, Heritage of the Invisible II, is out TODAY!

!!! order via our Bandcamp page !!!

STILL SOME BANDCAMP EXCLUSIVE

<< AGUA DORADA >> COLOR VINYL

Also today, we want to remind the world that there's a small amount of limited edition AGUA DORADA color vinyl copies of Heritage of the Invisible II still available via our Bandcamp page.

!!! Nab one while you can !!!

US INDIE RETAIL EXCLUSIVE

<< FRIED PLANTAIN >> COLOR VINYL

AND/OR ROUGH TRADE UK EXCLUSIVE BLUE VINYL

For folks who really love to taste the rainbow, there are a couple of additional color options available, to aid your tactile/aural synesthesia:

In the US & Canada, via our distribution partner RedEye, we're releasing an *indie retail exclusive* edition of the album on "Fried Plantain" color vinyl, limited to 200 copies. If you are an independent record store in the US or Canada, this one is for you! Hit up your folks at RedEye. And if you don't have folks at RedEye, hit us up, we'll get you hooked up.

For folks on the other side of the Atlantic, our friends at Rough Trade UK are selling a limited run of the album on BLUE vinyl.

If you are a record store looking for the album on good old fashioned black vinyl (or CD, god forbid)... Our records are distributed by RedEye in the US & Canada, as mentioned. For everywhere else in the world - UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, et al - our records are distributed by our good friends at K7 Records. If you need a connect, reply to this email and let us know, we'll help get you hooked up!

*** Please note that due to some shipping delays, many record stores won't have their LPs till sometime next week ***

NYC RELEASE SHOWS THIS WEEKEND

<< IRL >>

Believe it or not... Aquiles & Tcheser are doing some release shows this weekend in Brooklyn. With COVID precautions, of course (limited capacity, seated concert, temperature check, mask required, no bar). The venue is called, appropriately, IRL.

They'll be doing two sets across two nights, Sunday & Monday October 25th & 26th. Advance tickets strongly recommended!

RESERVE YOUR SEAT

PURCHASE TICKETS FOR IRL ONLINE

NAVARRO <> HOLMES

bio by Joe Darling

Aquiles Navarro was born in Toronto during a time of great political upheaval in his family’s native home of Panama. Dangers surrounding the reign of Manuel Noriega and the subsequent U.S. invasion of 1989 prompted the Navarro family’s exit, returning years later to Panama City in 1997. Navarro's grandfather was an accomplished cellist and the customs of Latin folkloric music were fastened deeply to the family paradigm. Navarro went on to study with Panamanian trumpeter Victor “Vitin” Paz (Fania All-Stars) and Panamanian-American saxophonist Carlos Garnett (who played and recorded with Miles Davis on numerous sessions including 1972’s On the Corner, as well as Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Andrew Hill, Charles Mingus, Gary Bartz, and Pharoah Sanders). In 2008, Navarro moved to Boston to continue his studies at the New England Conservatory (NEC) and, before the semester had even begun, a friendship had kindled between him and another incoming new student, Tcheser Holmes.

“The first few days, while moving into the dorms, I heard Tcheser play a rhythm on a friend's metal bed frame and I thought, ‘Ah man, he's got it,’” remembers Navarro. “From there on, we were always working on music, leading up to our first quartet tour in Panama right after graduation.”

Given a djembe at the age of 4, Tcheser Holmes naturally wove into the fabric of a tight-knit PanAfrican community in Brooklyn centered around the spiritual organization, Ausar Auset Society, and his family’s dance company, The Bennu Ausar Dancers. From early on, Holmes remembers “playing and viewing music purely as a source of celebration and achievement.” Holmes’ mother, Cecelia Adams-Holmes, was a consistent channel to him throughout his upbringing. A longtime arts educator, Adams-Holmes founded and continuously operates the cultural arts program at Kamit Preparatory Institute in Brooklyn. His uncle Ra Un Nefer Amen, a classically trained pianist from Panama, abandoned an established music career after migrating to Brooklyn in the 60s, instead focusing on the authorship of the Ausar Auset Society. “They’re definitely a force behind my music,” says Holmes. “My mom challenged me and made me take music seriously. And I always had a facility to go and practice.” Since Holmes’ high school didn’t have a music program, he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music’s Precollege for pre-conservatory training and eventually made his way toward NEC.

After their tenure at NEC, both musicians relocated to New York. “In New York, I've been a working musician since day 1,” recalls Navarro. “Tcheser and I played all over the city, from Uptown to all over Brooklyn, often booking our own gigs.” Dance clubs and subway platforms, The Bowery Poetry Club, the Latin Jazz Big Band at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, and Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound in the Bronx – the two musicians developed a wide creative range. “We got familiar with a system where the rhythm is quantified,” says Holmes. “But I feel like we always remained ‘children’ in terms of viewing music. Kobe said ‘Be a Kid.’ We never needed to validate the process.”

In September 2014, Navarro and Holmes self-released an album of improvisations that they’d recorded in Panama earlier that Summer. Back in Brooklyn the following Spring, they were invited to perform at an event organized by Musicians Against Police Brutality (MAPB). The Navarro/Holmes duo took the stage immediately before a formalizing performance by the trio of Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), Keir Neuringer, and Luke Stewart. The two groups made fast friends and, shortly after the MAPB event, came together to form the collective quintet Irreversible Entanglements.

In a single day of recording in Brooklyn on August 26th 2015, Navarro and Holmes’s very first time playing all together with Ayewa, Neuringer, and Stewart yielded Irreversible Entanglements’s self-titled debut album. Released by International Anthem & Don Giovanni in Fall 2017, Irreversible Entanglements vaulted the band forward, earning them space on year-end lists by WIRE Magazine, Bandcamp, and NPR Music, and growing audiences from prominent stages at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, NL, the Barbican in London, and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. In Spring 2019, Navarro and Holmes recorded their second album with Irreversible Entanglements, Who Sent You? (International Anthem/Don Giovanni 2020), which was released to high acclaim from The New Yorker, Stereogum, Pitchfork, Paste, and the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, The Nation, where writer Marcus J. Moore said "Irreversible Entanglements’ fearless music takes to task the police, American politics, capitalism, and racism."

After two years of growth and international touring with Irreversible Entanglements, Navarro and Holmes coalesced around the idea of composing new, expanded duo music; and in Fall 2019 they booked two after-hours sessions at Brooklyn’s S1 Studios. “Each tune has a compositional background to it, but improvisation and the telepathy between us remains the main catalyst,” notes Navarro. From this open map, the duo layered samples and electronic elements from Juno 106 and Moog Grandmother synths over their acoustic improvisations, overdubbed contributions from vocalist and instrumentalist friends, and added field recordings of themselves in conversation. To sculpt the mass of sounds, the duo commissioned ada adhiyatma (aka Madam Data, a Philadelphiabased composer/electronicist who they’d met through a joint collaboration with Moor Mother) for a final mix. The resulting album – Heritage of the Invisible II – reveals Navarro and Holmes stepping firmly into the limelight of progressive music-making.

The tracks flash by in a rapturous onslaught, crystalizing in incantations by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente (an apocalyptic fever dream on “Initial Meditation”), vocalist Brigitte Zozula (the bliss of bustling nightlife on “A Night in NY”), Navarro’s mentor and collaborator Carlos Garnett (the banality of economics on “$$$ /// billete”) and their own musings on friendship and community (the stoned soul picnic of “Plantains”). Of the album’s de facto anthem “Pueblo,” Navarro says “it’s a celebration of life, the coming together of the people, el pueblo, a celebration of who we are, where we come from, it’s our pueblo, our people, a feeling of openness, hope, and a future of unity from el pueblo, the people.” Identifying as active listeners and audience members as well, Navarro and Holmes step back on “M.O.N.K (Most Only Never Knew)” to shine a light on the solo improvisation of pianist/composer Nick Sanders. On the 8-minute duet “NAVARROHOLMES,” the two players reach a summit as they face off in spirited alliance, conjuring visions of legendary free jazz telepathics – Braxton and Roach, Coltrane and Ali, Cherry and Blackwell.

Navarro & Holmes never idle on Heritage of the Invisible II, choosing instead to ponder their origins in a devout charge of ecstatic cooperation. Meditating on the unseen constructive forces of culture and rhythm as a cadence encoded in one’s heritage, with Heritage of the Invisible II they share a volume of their story in rich color – a brilliantly imagined testament to generations of memory, creation, and existential joy.

order & enjoy

Heritage of the Invisible II

via our Bandcamp page TODAY