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MATANA ROBERTS

Matana Roberts

Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden

    Celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, soloist, band leader, educator, activist, and mixedmedia artist Matana Roberts returns with a new installment of their acclaimed Coin Coin series. For over a decade, Coin Coin has been the central artistic project for Roberts, a remarkable exploration of American ancestry and the nature of memory through “sound quilting”: modern composition that draws on a wide range of musical sources and traditions, along with researchdriven historical and genealogical narratives that yield prose and poetry both spoken and sung, field recordings, and graphic scores. The Quietus declares “when the 12-album cycle is complete, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of 21st century sonic and narrative art” and Pitchfork calls it “one of the most provocative ongoing bodies of work by any American musician.”

    Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden... is the first new recorded audio chapter since 2019 and centers upon reproductive rights, summoning the story of a family ancestor who died in early adulthood, from a cause kept obfuscated and hushed, shrouded in disinformation and shame. Roberts reimagines diaristic and oral narratives, delivered in strident streams of spoken word that punctuate the hour-long work, with recurring musical themes frequently accompanied by the declarative refrain "my name is your name / our name is their name / we are named / we remember / they forget.” As Roberts writes in the accompanying liner notes essay:

    I find it absolutely disgusting that the same trauma my grand ancestor, whose story we are telling in this chapter, is closely mirroring the experiences of some poor soul today as I write this... Our aforementioned grand, who perished at a young age, leaving her growing children motherless, did not have to die. The negative consequences of her death have reverberated down through generations in my family line, in the same way that a similar resounding might happen for someone else’s ancestral line generations from today. While often jazz-adjacent, and with Matana's inimitable saxophone and indomitable voice at the core, Roberts situates Coin Coin outside the Jazz genre and within heterodox pathways of postmodern composition, electroacoustic music, sound collage, experimental voice, and sound art.

    In the garden… undeniably continues to express and expand upon the project’s magnificent iconoclasm, nonetheless being the most jazz-inflected chapter since Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (2013). Recorded in Brooklyn with a stellar acoustic ensemble that includes Stuart Bogie, Gitanjali Jain, Darius Jones, Matt Lavelle, Mike Pride, Ryan Sawyer, Corey Smythe, and Mazz Swift, abetted by some sparkling pieces featuring modular synthesis courtesy of album producer Kyp Malone (Bent Arcana, TV On The Radio), In the garden… traverses a vivid stylistic array of thematic overtures, excursions and set pieces, ranging from spacious textural invocations to gorgeously tempered horn-led compositions to driving free jazz and exhilarating throughcomposed bursts of cacophony. With storytelling spoken-word lead vocals by Roberts channeled recurringly throughout, alongside various other deployments of layered and group voices, the album is alternately a meditation and fever dream of narrative potency.

    This is some of the most intense and intensive music Roberts has composed and captured to date, richly conceived and deeply felt, restless yet focused, unflinchingly substantive and unique. Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden... channels epigenetic trauma and tragedy with teeming complexity and fierce beauty — a eulogy, testimony, and celebration, melding music and language in a stunning polychromatic flow of vernaculars and poetics. A powerful work of subjective commemoration and historical-cultural communion that speaks indelibly to the present moment.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Matana Roberts has been at the forefront of the experimental jazz scene for some time now, and their Coin Coin series is one of the mainstays of an exceedingly strong CST roster. A peerless performer and impeccable composer and storyteller.

    TRACK LISTING

    1 We Said
    2 Different Rings
    3 Unbeknownst
    4 Predestined Confessions
    5 How Prophetic
    6 A Caged Dance
    7 I Have Long Been Fascinated
    8 Enthralled Not By Her Curious Blend
    8 No Way Chastened
    9 But I Never Heard A Sound So Long
    10 The Promise
    11 Shake My Bones
    12 A(way) Is Not An Option
    13 For They Do Not Know
    14 Others Each
    15 ...ain't I...your Mystery Is Our History

    Matana Roberts

    Coin Coin Chapter Four : Memphis

      Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series - a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for its fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of avant modern composition - Roberts calls it "panoramic sound quilting" - and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts' archival and often deeply personal research into legacies of the American slave trade and ancestries of American identity/experience. Roberts also emphasizes non-male subjects and thematises these other-gendered stories with a range of vocal and verbal techniques: singspeak, submerged glossolalic recitation, guttural cathartic howl, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group chant, and the recuperation of various American folk traditionals and spirituals, whether surfacing in fragmentary fashion or as unabridged set-pieces. The root of this vocality comes from her dedication to the legacy of her main chosen instrument, the alto saxophone.

      On Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus (guitars, fiddle, accordion) and percussionist Ryan Sawyer (Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, Cass McCombs) joined by Montreal bassist Nicolas Caloia (Ratchet Orchestra) and Montreal-Cairo composer/improviser Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Dwarfs Of East Agouza) on guitar and oud, along with prolific trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White as special guests. Memphis unspools as a continuous work of 21st century liberation music, oscillating between meditative incantatory explorations, raucous melodic themes, and unbridled free-improv suites, quoting archly and ecstatically from various folk traditions along the way. Led by Roberts' conduction and unique graphic score practice, her consummate saxophone and clarinet playing, and punctuated by her singing and speaking various texts generated from her own historical research and diaristic writings, Coin Coin Chapter Four is a glorious and spellbinding new installment in this projected twelve-part Gesamtkunstwerk

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Jewels Of The Sky: Inscription
      2. As Far As Eyes Can See
      3. Trail Of The Smiling Sphinx
      4. Piddling
      5.Shoes Of Gold
      6. Wild Fire Bare
      7. Fit To Be Tied
      8. Her Mighty Waters Run
      9. All Things Beautiful
      10. In The Fold
      11. Raise Yourself Up
      12. Backbone Once More
      13. How Bright Theyshine


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