A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Matana Roberts (b. 1975): Outstanding, versatile, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, producer, and teacher
New York- and Europe-based Matana Roberts
is an award-winning saxophonist, writer, composer, bandleader, and
sound-experimentalist and mixed-media practitioner. She works in many
contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and
theater. She is best known as the creator of the multi-volume conceptual
work Coin Coin. Begun in 2006 (the same year she issued her self-titled debut album, a jazz set with Chicago luminaries including Joshua Abrams, Jeff Parker, and Frank Rosaly),
the projected 12-part work of "panoramic sound quilting" aims to expose
the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions
of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive
engagement with narrativity, history, community, and political
expression within improvisatory musical structures. Its first volume, Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres appeared in 2011 and was followed by subsequent chapters Mississippi Moonchile and River Run Thee
in 2013 and 2015 respectively. After a four-year break during which she
performed live, taught, and contributed to recordings by others, she
returned with Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis during the fall of 2019.
Roberts
was born and raised on the south side of Chicago to parents who had
come through the radical changes brought on by the civil rights,
political, and anti-war struggles of the 1960s. They exposed her, from a
very young age, to arts, culture, and politics, from the established to
the radical. Roberts
began her musical training at the age of seven in the city's public
school system. She studied clarinet, violin, and bassoon. At the age of
16, under the tutelage of bassist Reginald Willis, she began to study
the saxophone and improvisation. It was an immersive experience that
changed the course of her life. She was a full participant in Chicago's
myriad music and art scenes. As a musician, she played with experimental
rock, Latin R&B, and jazz acts. She was also an avid writer who
began self-publishing 'zines and tracts, and participated in the theater
community by composing and performing music. Another early influence
was saxophonist, composer, and owner of the famed Velvet Lounge, Fred Anderson.
Along with drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Josh Abrams, she formed the trio Sticks & Stones. Their self-released debut was issued in 2002, followed by Shed Grace
for Thrill Jockey in 2004. She began gigging, working with other
players, and establishing herself as a session and live player. In 2005,
she began to work on composing and workshopping the Coin Coin cycle.
She also worked with the Burnt Sugar collective, as well as William Parker and rock groups including Godspeed! You Black Emperor and TV on the Radio. In 2006, she self-released her first date as a leader, Lines for Lacy, followed by The Calling in 2007.
In 2008, Roberts saw the release of her quartet offering, The Chicago Project, on Barry Adamson's Central Control label. The set was produced by Vijay Iyer. This was followed by international touring and other collaborations, including her appearance on Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra's Kollaps Tradixionales.
After witnessing a performance of Coin Coin Chapter One with her
Montreal ensemble, that city's Constellation label approached her about
making a record. She proposed her multi-volume Coin Coin project; they agreed without reservation. In February of 2011, her Live in London offering was released by Adamson's label, followed by Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libre in May. The album was universally acclaimed. Following more touring and collaborative work, she released Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile,
in October of 2013, the second volume in the 12-part series. The album
was selected by numerous media outlets in their year-end album lists.
Roberts spent much of 2014 writing and performing, including a celebrated duet performance with drummer Susie Ibarra at the Stone and as a participant in the 50th anniversary celebration for Terry Riley's In C. Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee
was released by Constellation in February of 2015. In May of the
following year, she received a Doris Duke Artist Award. In the fall of
2016, Roberts
was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Paris, France, in
partnership with Art Matters and the Jerome Foundation, where she
developed the fourth chapter of Coin Coin.
After spending several years living on houseboats in
Brooklyn -- where she learned to surf -- she began dividing her time
residing and working between New York and Europe. Between 2016 and 2018,
she performed a musical residency at Park Avenue Armory Veterans room,
had an installation at the Fridman Gallery called "Jump at the Sun,"
that showcased a single mixed-media score while a long-form sound quilt
ran in the background, and composed a work for a 30-person mixed chorus
in Berlin, using a visual digital score to build. She also she made a
rare guest appearance on Deerhoof's Mountain Moves album. In the fall of 2019, she released Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis on which convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus on guitars, fiddle, and accordion, percussionist Ryan Sawyer, Montréal bassist Nicolas Caloia, and Montréal-Cairo composer/improviser/ Sam Shalabi on guitar and oud. Guests included trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White.
Saxophonist Matana Roberts has been working on the multipart COIN COIN project since at least 2011. Its latest installment COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis is out now. (Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight)
“I don’t even know where to begin to talk about the COIN COIN project,” Matana Roberts said in 2011, just ahead of Gens De Couleur Libres being
released, the first of the project’s 12 planned “chapters.” “It’s
really multilayered, multisegmented, and there are just as many
meanings, if not more, as there are layers and segments.”
About eight years and three chapters later, COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis
is out, and it’s become clear just how true that assessment was. It’s
also no easier to capture it in words. Roberts again recently tried to
sum up a work that’s almost indescribable.
“I’m most interested in impression and abstraction, as well as a
certain cognitive dissonance,” she said. “I think I’m purposely
exploring dreamscape-like spaces in each segment of the work. Sometimes
more like a fever dream, which makes a lot more room for the inherent
harmony of dissonance.”
As ephemeral as it is, “dreamscape” is perhaps the most useful descriptor of the music. COIN COIN has the subconscious-tickling, alien-but-familiar feel of an aural Finnegans Wake.Each of its four chapters so far (Gens De Couleur Libres,Mississippi Moonchile, River Run Thee and Memphis)
weaves together musique concrete, free-jazz, minimalist drones,
snatches of indie-rock, composed melodies, hymns, folk music of all
kinds and amorphous textures.
It also includes an equal variety of vocal music. Memphis
alone features a harmony setting of the traditional “Roll The Old
Chariot Along” and a solo “This Little Light Of Mine,” as well as
first-person texts that are partly sung, partly spoken, partly shouted.
The texts themselves have the same disparate makeup as everything else:
There are bits of personal stories, poems, lyrics, histories and
biographies, as well as wordless chants and bellowing.
This all adds up to a very large, very dense sonic patchwork, as Roberts herself acknowledges. She refers to COIN COIN’s compositional technique as “panoramic sound quilting.”
“[The American tradition of] quilting often took a lot of
disparate, nonrelated parts and patched them together into a thing of
great beauty and comfort,” she said. “This is what I’m trying to do in
sculpting my own sound language: to “quilt” with all these different
sounds and textures, pastiched together in a way that brings me great
joy as an American craftsperson.”
She “quilts” with the textual content as well: “It’s a mix of a lot
of historical hallmarks, some personal but many not ... . The entire
project is a precarious love-hate-love letter to my birth country: a
celebration of the human experience, American style.”
Which means that despite what the numbered chapter framework might
suggest, it’s folly to look for a linear narrative among the pieces.
Roberts isn’t taking a novelistic approach. Rather, she’s expounding on a
theme—African-American history and culture as a subjective, malleable,
ultimately unknowable thing—from a variety of abstract perspectives.
Not all of those perspectives are even Roberts’ own. Collaboration
is an essential aspect of the project. Each chapter so far has used a
different ensemble (or in the case of Chapter Three: River Run Thee, Roberts alone), and the musicians have substantial space to contribute to the work.
“She’s very open to how people interpret what she’s giving them,
and working with that,” said drummer Tomas Fujiwara, who appeared on Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile and
has helped to develop pieces from other chapters in live performance.
“That’s one of the things I love about working with Matana: She really
finds a great balance between giving you a lot of information and things
to think about and process, but also then a lot of freedom to do your
thing and also to interpret the information that she’s giving you. I
don’t think I’ve ever had an experience where she hands you a score and
you’re playing it, and she’s like, ‘No, no.’”
If each chapter is eclectic, each—partly as a result of that
openness—is wide-ranging in its own way and takes each installment one
step further from a linear structure. “I see certain techniques that
carry through,” said Fujiwara. “But for the most part, when we’re
working on a specific piece, we focus on it as a freestanding piece with
its own narrative and process and technique.”
That said, the first four chapters retain a conceptual throughline:
the idea of place or of America as both a single place and a collection
of places. The first explored Louisiana; the second, Mississippi; the
third, the Confederate States of America; and the fourth, Tennessee.
“I’ve been locating the meaning of American place,” said Roberts, “and
questioning that as an outsider to these places, in a sense, as I grew
up mostly in the Midwest and parts of the northern East Coast.”
However, she cautioned, that will not carry through to the eight
chapters still to come. “They’re less about place and more specific to
certain historical events in a different kind of way,” she said.
“Inhabiting a different spirit and sound world for me altogether.”
In short, even the sketchiest outline of a definition for COIN COIN
is treacherous—implying, perhaps, the “cognitive dissonance” that
Roberts evoked in her description. And not even the saxophonist is
certain where the project ultimately will conclude. “I spearheaded the
foundation, but at this point, the work is telling me what it wants and
needs, how it wishes to be placed in the world,” she said. “I used to
make fun of artist friends who would say things like ‘I’m a conduit, the
work is speaking through me, I’m not really in control.’ But that is
actually what is happening for me now.” DB
Matana Roberts is a dynamic saxophonist, composer and improviser, who tries to expose
in her music the mystical roots and spiritual traditions of African American creative
expression.
A Chicago native, she was fortunate enough to be surrounded by elder musicians who
showed her by distinct example the importance of listening to one's personal creative
voice while at the same time using the profound and many layered traditions of jazz and
improvised musics to act only as her creative guide, not as her creative definer. By using
their mentorship, she has been able to craft a voice and creative focus that truly speaks to
her own true artistic individuality. She feels strongly that her music should not only reflect
the many colors and moods of universal human emotions, but that it should also testify,
critique, document, and respond to the many socio-economic, historical, and cultural
inequalities that exist not only in this country, but all over the world.
Her second recording collaboration with bassist Joshua Abrams and drummer/
percussionist Chad Taylor - known as sticks&stones was released to critical acclaim on
Thrill Jockey records in June of 2004.( www.thrilljockey.com)
She has played alongside such musical luminaries as Steve Lacy, Eugene Chadbourne,Hery
Grimes, Hannah Marcus, Fred Anderson, Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, Robert Barry, Joe
Maneri, Miya Masaoka, Vijay Iyer, David Boykins, and Ralph Alessi.
Matana is currently working on a recording of “live electronic” solo compositions, a string
project to be premiered in October 2004, and is collaborating with wordsmith Reg E.
Gaines and tap dancer Savion Glover on a project that explores the legacy of saxophonist
John Coltrane. She is also an associate member of the A.A.C.M.--Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians. Matana is also on the faculty of S.I.M.--School For
Improvised Music.
John Zorn has invited the Chicagoan alto saxophonist Matana Roberts to
curate at The Stone. The most common practice is for a month to be
shared by two artists, but Roberts has all of January to herself. It's a
sign of an omnivorous musical appetite that she's struggled to cram all
of her dream-choices into a mere four weeks. It's also unusual for an
artist not to showcase several of their own band permutations. Showing
remarkable restraint, Roberts will only be performing on a single
evening, as part of Zorn's monthly rent party.
She elaborates:
"John approached me and I was very flattered to be asked, but also
scared senseless as it seemed to me, hearing from of all my friends
who've curated, that the process can be akin to a lot of mental
craziness. But John actually gave me a full year to pull the calendar
together, which was almost crazy in itself when you think about how far
ahead he has to think for that space! In the end, I thought that the
challenge would be interesting since I have rarely ever curated anywhere
else. I felt that, since having the whole month to basically devote to
my friends and folks who have supported and or played my music in one
way or the other, that featuring myself would take away from the
opportunities for others who rarely, if ever, get to play their own
music at The Stone. Hilliard Greene, for instance, one of the premier
bassists in NYC, has never had the opportunity to present his own music
there. To me that is a tragedy and it felt good to have the means to
change it."
Roberts has been residing in NYC for much of the
last decade, prolifically producing a body of work that, while still
highlighting her actual soloing prowess, is heavily involved with
conceptual backgrounds. She's concerned with the words behind (or in
front of) spontaneity, melding composition and improvisation while
carefully selecting her bandmates to ensure specific sonic palettes that
suit the intent, the mood and the occasion. The result is a music that
sounds controlled, but without relinquishing its sense of risk.
It's completely fitting that Roberts is a member of the AACM
(Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), as the Art
Ensemble of Chicago, and in particular, Roscoe Mitchell must surely be
crucial to her early musical and philosophical development. In recent
years, her core project is the Coin Coin series of pieces, but Roberts'
highest profile album so far has been The Chicago Project,
released in 2008 by the British label Central Control. She has no
settled combo here in New York, but Roberts has been operating her more
stable Panther outfit in London, where she's developing something of a
parallel profile.
In December, Roberts reached the culmination of her artist-in-residency
stint at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. She performed the latest
installment of Coin Coin, an ambitious sequence of work that sets out to
probe (and evoke or respond to) its composer's ancestral lineage,
traveling as far back as the 1700s. The music made radical hops from
chamber severity to swinging old-time jazz, as viola and cello
flourishes exchanged dominance with trinkling barroom piano. Roberts
alternated between free jazz crying and sweetly-singing Johnny Hodges
invocations. Her voice is also a frightening weapon. Face daubed like a
Japanese Butoh dancer (or a Haitian voodoo zombie), Roberts vocalized
multilayered screams that were imbued with sheer despair, emerging from a
deeply primordial glottis.
"Many of the folks listed [at The
Stone] are people that have performed some of my music with me for very
little financial gain," Roberts continues. "So also giving them a slot
was a way to say thank you and sorry I can't really compensate you for
your pricelessness. I could have easily set up two weeks of Coin Coin
experiments, something I did consider when John first approached me, as
there are 12 segments to the narrative. I have only gotten to segment 6
now, but in the end it just didn't feel like the right time for my own
little creative marathon."
Roberts is also presenting
Illumination at Roulette this month. This promises to be calmer. Maybe.
Illumination is not so much a band as a working strategy. "I don't name
my bands too often anymore," says Roberts. "I find that in New York it's
hard for me to keep a regular working band, but easier for my own
creative vision to develop compositional frameworks that I can expand on
and experiment with, that are very particular to themes, ideas and
personal interests. I want to explore and share with other sound makers I
admire. It also helps me in spreading out the web of folks I'd really
like to make music with in NYC and beyond as there are so many talented
folks out there dealing with improvisation these days."
Illumination
is much less specific than Coin Coin. "It's my attempt to have a little
balance with that as I have found doing very culturally specific
creative exploration has trapped me in at times." The gig will also
feature Damion Reid (drums), Shelley Burgon (harp), Graham Haynes
(cornet) and Gabriel Guerreo (piano). The subject matter will be
contrastingly abstract: "Illumination is based on research I am digging
into about dream states and the act of dreaming while in sleep. There's
so much that has been done in research on this topic and I have found
some really interesting recurring themes in my own dream states, that
I'm exploring in this project. I've been keeping dream journals for a
long time. It occurred to me that the stories and recurrent themes
showing up could actually be represented in sound in a way that might be
interesting to me for further personal exploration. I also like the
human universality that this approach could possibly represent. I like
to compose sound, arrange sound and improvise sound almost as if molding
an object of sorts. But I don't like having to sacrifice one for the
sake of the other and believe that at least in my vision they can all
co-exist in a way that really represents what I hear in my head, though
this has not always proven to be successful!"
Recommended Listening:
Sticks and Stones, Eponymous (482 Music, 2002)
Sticks and Stones, Shed Grace (Thrill Jockey, 2003)
Matana Roberts, The Calling (Utech, 2004)
Burnt Sugar, If You Can't Dazzle Them with Your Brilliance, Then Baffle Them With Your Blisluth (Trugoid, 2004)
Matana Roberts, Lines for Lacy (s/r, 2006)
Matana Roberts, The Chicago Project (Central Control, 2008)
Whether
or not you believe in reincarnation, saxophonist/composer Matana
Roberts, sounds as if she's been here before. You can hear it in her
voice, a definite tonality, a lyrical spiritual essence that recalls the
voices of reed players Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, and
others—one of profound soulfulness, passion and purity. Yet the
embodiment of Roberts is devoid of mimicry or pretense, because she
possesses her own identity as revealed on The Chicago Project.
Roberts, a member of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians), who has served on the faculty of SIM (School For Improvised
Music), is joined by equally progressive-minded players in her native
stomping ground of Chicago. Her quartet includes guitarist Jeff Parker
(Chicago Underground Trio, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble),
bassist Josh Abrams (Josh Abrams Quartet) and drummer Frank Rosaly (Ken
Vandermark). As far as modern jazz is concerned, the nine selections on
the recording are cognizant of its history, but represent a current view
of the genre, touching the corners of post-bop, avant-garde, free jazz,
and Roberts' own bright ideas.
Produced by pianist Vijay Iyer,
another young music idealist, the recording is a clear demonstration of
Roberts' playing and composing abilities, wherein there are moments of
brilliance, the execution of a superb young band, and music that has
much feeling. The selections feature the saxophonist's original material
with the quartet and three duo tracks with the esteemed elder statesman
and a founding AACM member, saxophonist Fred Anderson.
"Exchange" moves through many waters: abstract, blues, modal, and swing,
opening with anguished wails from Roberts' alto, then syncopated,
doubling bass and drums, and multiple changes. It sounds and feels like
the music of yesterday and today, a timeless traveling through the paths
of backwoods or urban streets.
Next is the more accessible
"Thrills," with its circuitous pattern and shifts between two motifs
containing the groove and hard blues. "Nomra," is a lovely and
thoughtful ballad where Roberts' fluttering horn shares the melody with
Parker's tender, empathetic guitar lines. The track ends with Roberts'
voice soaring like a bird in flight.
The sentiments of peace
and turmoil are conveyed in "Love Call" as the quartet traverse
unsettling improvisations reminiscent of saxophonist John Coltrane's
later works. Yet they swing gracefully on "South By West," each voice
divergent but unified; Abrams' probing bass solo followed tandem solos
by Parker and Roberts. The final quartet track, "For Razi," contains
bizarre instruments sounds produced by each musician including Rosaly's
wonderful drum solo. The idiosyncrasies of Roberts' writing on this
atmospheric piece are like intruding into someone's memories,
introspective and intriguing.
The three duo "Birdhouse" tracks
are heavenly. The birdsong of Roberts' alto and Anderson's tenor are not
just dueling soloists but more of an improvisational dialog between the
elder and the younger musician, in a mix of exhilarating free play and
interweaving lines.
The Chicago Project will
hopefully receive the attention it deserves as a unique and memorable
work from an artist whose creative flame burns deep. Good musicians are
also good listeners. Roberts has carefully listened to others and has
learned. But she's also listening to her inner voice and it will be
interesting to hear where she ventures next.
Tracks: Exchange; Thrills; Birdhouse 1; Nomra; Love Call; Birdhouse 2; South By West; For Razi; Birdhouse 3.
Personnel: Matana Roberts: alto saxophone; Josh Abrams: bass; Jeff
Parker: guitar; Frank Rosaly: drums; Fred Anderson: tenor saxophone (3,
6, 9).
In 100 one-hour programs, the series Jazz at 100 told the story of
recorded jazz. It established the foundations upon which the broadly
diverse music of today is built. This is the first hour of the successor
series which aims to give voice to the current jazz scene and
appreciates its countless creators.
In 1965, the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians was founded with the motto,
"Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." In 2015, AACM celebrated its
fiftieth anniversary and this week we focus on recent strong outings
from Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid and Matana Roberts, has been having a compelling renewal.
Playlist
Host Intro 0:00
Mike Reed's People, Places & Things with Matthew Shipp "Fear Not of Man" from A New Kind of Dance (482 Music) 3:00
Mike Reed's People, Places & Things with Marquis Hill "Kwela for Taylor" from A New Kind of Dance (482 Music) 8:12
Mike Reed's Flesh & Bone "Watching The Boats" from Flesh & Bone (482 Music) 13:56
Matana Roberts is a young (younger than me, anyway)
alto saxophonist very much worth your attention. Born in Chicago, she’s
been mostly New York-based for several years now, and has three albums
to her name—The Chicago Project (with guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Frank Rosaly backing her on most tracks, plus several saxophone duos with Fred Anderson), Live in London (with pianist Robert Mitchell, bassist Tom Mason and drummer Chris Vatalaro) and the brand new Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres, a live recording featuring too many musicians to list here. (Go read this Chicago Reader piece to get much more information about Coin Coin,
and Roberts’ early years, than is provided below. Then come back.) She
can also be heard on two CDs by her collaborative trio with Abrams and Chad Taylor, Sticks and Stones, and several records by Greg Tate‘s improvising jazz-funk-rock-etc. ensemble Burnt Sugar.
Roberts’ saxophone sound really works for me. It’s rough and
thoroughly human, and/but bolstered by excellent technique and a real
sense of composition. She doesn’t just write little singsong melodies
that will allow her to solo until the audience begs for mercy. She
composes whole pieces, and has complete, multifaceted thoughts. But
she’s not a post-Steve Coleman nerd, in any sense.
She’s got a deep and unmistakable feeling for the blues, even as she
puts together a multi-part suite with narration, strings, and much, much
more. Coin Coin is a hyper-ambitious work that never becomes
alienating; indeed, it’s one of the most interesting and emotionally
involving jazz records I’ve heard all year. The final track, “How Much
Would You Cost?”, is fucking heartbreaking.
Here’s a video of the Chicago Project band playing live in 2007:
And here’s a solo performance from All Tomorrow’s Parties in December 2010:
The interview (originally conducted for a feature which will appear in the next issue of The Wire) is below.
—Phil Freeman
Darius Jones says alto saxophonists tend to be purists who
only play alto, while tenor saxophonists are “whores” who’ll play
soprano, alto, C-melody, whatever.
That sounds like Darius.
What about you? Do you play more than one horn?
I play clarinet. That’s my secondary horn. I feel like my voice is
really on the alto saxophone, but I started on clarinet, so it’s a very
easy instrument for me to go back to, and I enjoy improvising on it and
creating work on it. The other saxophones just have never really been of
much interest to me. Sometimes I don’t feel there’s enough love for the
alto, and I think the alto needs a certain kind of concentration. The
tenor does too, but it’s just different. It’s a different sort of
feeling.
There’s a quote in the press release for Coin Coin that describes your “continued attraction/repulsion to parts of the American jazz tradition”—what parts repel you?
The sections that I find most repellent are just the factions that don’t
allow for original expression of any kind. Where it’s so much about the
re-creation of people who are long dead, or people who have made a
certain sort of statement and so then you have a whole series of people
who want to just kind of re-quote those people. I don’t really find that
interesting. I don’t have a problem with it, and I accept it, but I
feel like there are certain elements of that tradition that is not
accepting for someone like me, and I’ve gotten tired of being quiet
about it. I used to keep it inside and say, well, this is the core music
from which I come, and I’m not going to deny that, and I don’t want to
disrespect it, but it’s gotten to a certain point where someone has to
say something and I feel like I’m in a position to be honest about those
things. And there’s also the patriarchy involved as well. That’s a
whole other thing that has not always completely let me in, and so I’m
just gonna make my own doorway.
As a critic, the thing I hate the most is when major labels put out a “Young Guy plays the music of Dead Guy” album.
Yeah, it’s just embarrassing. I get so embarrassed about that because
the people that they have do that are very talented musicians, you know?
I feel bad for them.
Now speaking of patriarchy, you’re a member of the AACM…
I am a distant member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. I’m not as active as I used to be.
That has kind of a boys’ club reputation. So tell me a little
about that, and also what you see as the role or mission of the AACM in
2011 as compared with the function it served in the 1960s and 1970s?
Well, I have a deep love for that organization. I’m also a member of the
Black Rock Coalition. Musicians, artists coming together, if I can be
any sort of part of that, I’m gonna be part of that. The AACM is very
particular in that they have always done a lot of community outreach and
a lot of community work in conjunction with what they do. Which is
partly how I became involved with them, maybe back in ’95 or ’96. I was
teaching at their school, the community school, they were doing that
sort of outreach work. And I also came up listening to a lot of their
music, thanks to family members who were really into the AACM. So
there’s that. The question of womanhood within that, I think it’s part
of a larger issue as why, when I was coming up, you didn’t really see
that many women. There were women, but there weren’t very many woman
horn players in Chicago, for instance, when I was coming up. I feel like
those things are gonna shift. What I see the AACM doing in 2011 versus
what it did in the ’60s and where I get the most encouragement from is
they’re very good at creating environments. The first and second
generation of folk who were more pioneering, you know? The New York
AACM, which I’m more involved with at this point than the Chicago AACM,
from my experience with them they’re always creating environments for
younger musicians to have a platform to do what it is they would really
like to do. I think that’s their most important [role], showcasing that
and also, with my recent involvement with the New York AACM, it’s been
very interesting—there’s a lot of talk of, you know, we all have to
stick together. It’s all about all these individual voices, but also
trying to come together in some way, even if it’s very simple. You know,
showing up at the AACM concerts and just seeing people, or going out to
see other people’s work, or just letting them know that you can talk to
them. I’ve gotten so much great advice from Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis and Amina Claudine Myers. It’s a blast as an alto saxophone player to see Henry Threadgill
at my shows. That’s a nervous moment, you know, but it’s a huge
compliment. So it’s complicated, but I’m glad that I’ve had the access
and connection to those people, and also folks in Chicago, like Nicole Mitchell. That’s a huge help for me. Fred Anderson, I can’t even—you wouldn’t even know my name if it wasn’t for Fred Anderson.
The duets with Anderson on The Chicago Project
are pretty interesting—you seem to have gotten him out of his comfort
zone and kept him from returning to the stock phrases he used a lot of
the time. How did that work? What was it like playing with him?
It was something, you know. Originally what I was going to do—I wanted
to create that record to thank people who have helped me to be where I
am at this moment, and everyone on that record—Josh Abrams and Jeff Parker I’ve known forever, Frank Rosaly
is someone I met towards the end there, but they’ve always been very
supportive. And Fred, originally what I wanted is I was going to do a
trio of me, Fred Anderson and I wanted Von Freeman.
Because the two of them were really kind of the pillars, coming up in
Chicago. But I’m really glad that I didn’t do that because you would
have had to carry me out on a stretcher after it was over. Fred was
being very gracious on those [tracks]. He was always teaching me and
showing me by example. He was a man of very few words and when he did
speak it was very powerful. And when he spoke through his horn, it was
just as powerful. So at those particular sessions—I don’t even think I
can put into words what I learned, yet, you know? There was so much
knowledge and so much wisdom he was giving in those moments that I will
be able to listen back to them for years to come and think, Oh yeah, he
did this here in this part of the duet. I wonder why?
The whole Chicago atmosphere is so different—New York is so
cannibalistic, and it’s only in recent years that people have started
coming together to help each other.
Things are changing in New York in interesting ways. I mean, there’s
always been—I used to get kind of down on New York about the sense of
community. Having some sense of community is very important to me, and
the reason why my life is so gypsy-like in some ways has a lot to do
with not always being able to find that community in New York. But it is
here, and it’s really here right now with a lot of the burgeoning
things going on in Brooklyn, and some stalwart places still around
trying to support musicians. Everybody’s moving to Brooklyn right now. I
mean, the Roulette experimental music space is moving to Brooklyn,
Issue Project Room is moving deeper into Brooklyn, you still have places
like the Jazz Gallery that’s been always very supportive of people, and
you still have—I mean, for what it’s worth, Patricia Parker
works really hard on behalf of the Vision Festival and Arts for Art, so
you have that, and then you have other people who are realizing that
there needs to be more opportunity. I like looking at people like John Zorn,
for instance, who—they’re creating their work and they’re creating
their music, but they’re also finding ways to give back to their
community and create community. The Stone, to me, is kind of like that.
And Tonic was sort of like that, but not so much. The Stone is more
like that, for me. And [Zorn] helped me do curation at a space, the
University of the Streets, which used to be a pretty happening space I
guess a while back and it’s kind of fallen under the radar, and now a
whole new community of musicians is trying to do things there. And then
you have musicians in Brooklyn coming together, there’s a Brooklyn
Improvisers’ or Jazz Collective that’s happening. You’ve got George
Lewis at Columbia University holding these open public symposia and
talks and things that many musicians in Manhattan are making their way
over to. So there are all these different things going on, but in New
York you have to work harder to see them sometimes. Because you’re just
shocked. You’re just walking around in shock every day.
The Live in London album was
recorded with little or no preparation or rehearsal, yes? Was
that
dictated by circumstance or did you plan it that way?
Partly the plan. We had played together before at the Vortex maybe a
year earlier. But yes, partly by circumstance, because I don’t live
there, but I wanted to have—I wanted to figure out a way to have
ensembles in different places that I can develop material with over
time. And the musicians on that record are folks I’d been very familiar
with for a while, so I knew what they could handle, and I’d played with
them before, so I was like, Let’s do this, and then right before that
was supposed to happen I got a call that the BBC wants to record this
live, and to be honest, as a composer and a performer I was like, I
don’t know. You know? It’s gonna be really raw, and I’m not sure I want
to encapsulate that for the world to hear at the moment. I’ll
encapsulate it for me to hear and consider. But then they recorded it
and broadcast it and I was like, fine, that’s great, nobody will hear
it. And then Central Control
contacted me and said, ‘You know, these sets are great. We should put
this out.’ And I originally was like, No, no, no. No no no no no. ‘Cause
it’s so raw. But I do love live recordings, and I was like, Well, this
is an opportunity for people to really hear us riding by the seat of our
pants. Cause that’s what that record really is.
Are you still a member of Burnt Sugar?
No. I stopped playing in Burnt Sugar in maybe 2006, but they’re really good at continuing to put out records that I’m on. [laughs]
What was your experience with that group like? What did you take from it, and what was the studio methodology like?
Their studio methodology is “By any means necessary.” Get in there and do it. That’s what I remember. Greg Tate
is a big champion of me, and championed me from the moment I got here,
and playing in that band is really fun, traveling with that band is
really fun, but it’s also really exhausting. It’s pretty exhausting work
in some ways. It takes a lot. But learning that conduction system is
very interesting, and I also got a chance to work with Butch Morris
through that, when he would conduct Burnt Sugar from time to time. And
you got to see the differences. Greg is a wild conductor, you know?
Yeah. I saw the group play at the Vision Festival [in 2004], and I think you were still a member at that point.
Oh, wow, yeah. That was so long ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I learned how to
really center my sound, ’cause you have to in that band. If you don’t do
that, ain’t nobody gonna hear you. So you’ve gotta really, really
center your sound. And it was interesting—a lot of the horn players had
electronic effects, and during that time I was trying to be a real
purist about that and I was very anti-that. Some of them would say,
“Just get yourself a little something,” and I was like, No! I’m about
the alto, the sound of the alto. That’s what I want people to hear. You
know, these things. They really opened me up, that band.
What kind of leader are you, generally?
Ooh. Hmm. Um, I would like to think that I leave room for people to
really express their true essence in some of the music, which is kind of
why I’m really interested in graphic notation. A lot of the Coin Coin
scores are graphically notated, with a mixture of Western notation and
graphic notation—it gives an opportunity for real kind of opening. I
hope that I am the type of leader that allows that opening. I like to
hope that I’m the type of leader that tries to respect the other
musicians in every possible aspect that I can. Which in some ways is one
reason why I haven’t put out that many records. Because I’m not always
approached by record labels in a way that treats the other musicians
respectfully. And that’s really important to me. I like to treat people
the way that I wish to be treated, since I have worked under other
bandleaders myself. But I don’t think I can really answer that question
honestly. I think I’m quite biased.
Do you compose full pieces, usually, or do you mostly just write platforms for improvisation?
No, sometimes I do compose full pieces. It depends on how they come to
me. a lot of the early records that I did with Josh Abrams and Chad Taylor as Sticks and Stones, a lot of those compositions were straight—they just kind of poured out. One of the reasons I created the Coin Coin
work is so I could deal with these patches that I would write and I
just couldn’t figure out—they would not come out fully formed, and I
could not figure out what to do with them. Or they’d come out in these
snippets, and then I’d focus on carving these snippets into things I’d
like, but they still were not fully formed. And then I found out later
that oh, yesterday I heard this part, but a month later I could hear
this part. And these two things are part of the same thing, and I’m
going to put them together, and seeing them together, oh, here it is. So
it depends on the ensemble and the environment that I’m writing for, to
be honest.
What is the source of the spoken texts? Are they family history or something written specially for this?
I do different things. Because I like to write. I was a zine writer for a
while there. The zines I do now, I don’t really deal with so much text,
and I’m dealing with this blogosphere stuff, and I go back and forth
about that. But the text—it was a chance for me to explore creative
writing, which is something I’m interested in, and it’s a tradition I
come from in my own family. Very verbose people, sometimes a little too
over-intellectual, some of them, but that is just how things are. You
know? It’s just how it is. [laughs] And then there’s this whole
other side, of fewer words, coming from a different sort of background.
So there’s always this mix. The texts on the record that you heard is a
text that I created myself, imagining myself as a slave woman and
telling this story. And I’ve tweaked it over the last four or five
years, I’ve changed some things. I used to do theater, I did theater in
Chicago, God, mid ’90s, early ’90s, and one play I was involved with
more on the musical side, not the poetry side, though, was Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.
And I got to sit and listen to that poetry—I think that show ran for
six months at the Steppenwolf Theater. And I got to sit and listen to
that poetry and the way it infused me was really, really powerful. And I
wanted to figure out a way to do that with my own work. So the words
that you hear, I’m speaking by memory and trying to infuse them and
trying to become. The second chapter of Coin Coin, that text is
actually an interview I did with my 80-year-old, paternal,
Mississippi-born grandmother, where you hear her answers but not my
questions, and I read it like prose.
When is the second chapter going to be released?
We’re still talking about it. There’s a live recording of that up on A Blog Supreme.
They have a version of it running. It’s not the version that I would
put out, but it will give you some idea. I hope to put that out next
year.
The press release says the Coin Coin
project is multimedia—are you planning on doing anything that would be
filmed for a DVD, say? Are the visuals necessary to the work?
It’s not necessary, and it’s been really interesting to see if it is.
There was one show that I did recently in Seattle where I could not get
the whole visual projections and things that I use to work. I’m
interested in also doing sound installations and creating sound
environments, so this is also a chance for me to deal with that, and I
build videos, so there was this performance I did with ten improvisers
in Seattle of the chapter that you heard, and the video would not work.
And it was like, All right, well, we’re gonna see whether the music can
really stand for itself. And it did. But the visual element is very much
a part of the music, the way that I bring the music together. I don’t
explore the visual element in every chapter of Coin Coin. But
the first chapter for sure, and the second chapter, and some of the solo
chapters, I do do that. And I hope to do more with the visuals actually
part of the score that the musicians are dealing with. And so that’s
kind of the next step.
A lot of jazz players are very involved with social
media—they’re all over Twitter and Facebook especially. But your MySpace
page is a ghost town, you’re not on Facebook anymore…is this a
conscious retreat?
It is a conscious retreat, because I find it incredibly overwhelming at
times. If I had known that these were the things that I would have to do
in order to survive, to make my work, I would not be doing what I’m
doing. I’m not so sure. So I’ve had to find some different ways to kind
of navigate around it. Facebook, I think, was very interesting. For me
personally sometimes it started to feed weird ideas of ego that made me
really uncomfortable. So I was like, Okay, I’ve gotta find another way.
Twitter…I said I was never gonna join Twitter. “The root word of Twitter
is twit, and I’m not doing this.” But at the same time, the DIY
aesthetic is very important to me. Doing it yourself, and the amount of
things that you can do now to get things out there to people—it’s
amazing. So what I do is I see what works for a while, and then kind of
move away. Facebook—I’m not sure people really look at their feeds that
much, you know what I’m saying? Because you get so many things. Twitter
is interesting. I try to keep it limited. I’ve learned some things about
that. Same thing with Facebook. There was definitely a learning curve.
But what I like about Twitter is it’s taught me to be a little less
verbose in general. Blogs, the whole blogosphere thing is interesting,
especially what it’s done for the whole jazz community, but I’ve also
found that the blogosphere, if you’re not careful in how you utilize it,
it can actually push people away, in the same way that a jazz solo can
push listeners away if there’s a certain foundation of understanding
that is not there for them. So I’ve kind of changed the way that I deal
with that. I feel that MySpace, I just don’t know what to think about
it, but I am overwhelmed by technology, yes. To sum it up, I’m
overwhelmed.
Roberts has been called "a major talent" (The Wire) and "the
spokeswoman for a new, politically conscious and refractory Jazz scene"
(Jazzthetik). Her Coin Coin work has been widely and highly praised for
its stylistic innovations and narrative power. Noted music critic Peter
Margasak has written of Coin Coin: "Memory is a powerful thing, but it's
so private, fluid, and unreliable that it can seem almost impossible to
capture in a work of art—and history is often no more stable, once you
look closely enough. Roberts has succeeded at evoking both, though, and
gives her audience a long look at something ghostly, tragic, and
beautiful. She is carving out her own aesthetic space, startling in its
originality and gripping in its historic and social power."
A self-taught mixed media composer, the Chicago-born Roberts earned two
degrees in performance from a smattering of American institutions but
received her primary training from free arts programs in the American
Public School System.
She is a past member of the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) and The
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). She has
been a Van Lier Fellow, a Brecht Forum Fellow, a Copeland Fellow, a
Jerome fellow, an ICASP fellow, an FCA awardee, and an Alpert Award In
The Arts winner. She is also a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award
and the Doris Duke Artist Award. She has been invited to teach, lecture,
run workshops and/or take up artistic residencies in countless places
under different conditions and with diverse communities over the past
decade and is a past faculty member of the Banff Creative Music
Workshop, Rhythmic Music Conservatory, School for Improvised Music, and
Bard College.
Throughout the summer of 2015, Roberts engaged in a series of open-ended
public explorations as part of an extended residency at the Whitney
Museum of American Art. She titled this series of research-based sound
excavations i call america, building on the title of the Whitney's
inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See. Building on this work she
has gone on to present three public exhibitions of her graphic score
work, including i call america II in 2016 and "jump at the sun…" in 2018
at the Fridman Gallery in NYC. The first European exhibition of her
work happened at the Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen Norway, 2018.
In 2015 she collaborated with the filmmaker Laura Hanna on a film short
entitled CODE: Stop & Frisk. From this work in 2016, she began to
organize public art talks and concert fundraisers that contributed to
the families of victims of police brutality. In 2017 she built off this
work creating a mixed media work for a 32 piece chorus, entitled
“…breathe…”. It was premiered in Berlin, Germany as part of the No
festival, sharing the bill with Pussy Riot. The piece was then premiered
in NYC also in 2017, at the Roulette Intermedium.
In 2015 Roberts began her "In Memorium" series, initiated by an
interaction with Eva Hesse’s sculpture untiled no. 1 at the Whitney
Museum. In 2016 the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery commissioned a piece for
saxophone septet called "its all a damn game," which was created in
conversation with Andrews' artwork and writing. Next in the series was a
mixed media piece for chorus, commissioned by the Berlin Jazz Festival,
entitled "For Pina", based on the work of dance legend Pina Bausch. In
2017 she performed an in memorium interaction with Louise Bourgeois's
Spider that was on view as part of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An
Unfolding Portrait.
In 2017 Roberts also presented solo work in conjunction with the
exhibition COSMOPOLIS #1 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE at the Centre Pompidou.
In 2018 Roberts presented another new mixed media piece for drum choir
at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC. Also in 2018 Roberts toured alongside
British sound artist Kelly Jayne Jones, in a collaborative piece that
combined different elements of their mixed media practices.
Roberts has played with and alongside Rob Mazurek, Myra Melford, Vijay
Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Greg Tate, Nicole Mitchell, Henry Grimes, Kyp
Malone, Meshell N' degeocello, Jayne Cortez, Seb Rochford, Fred
Anderson, Latasha Diggs, George Lewis, Craig Taborn, Tyshawn Sorey,
David Berhman, Kyp Malone, Pat Thomas, Pauline Oliveros, Reg E. Gaines,
Daniel Givens, Savion Glover, Anthony Braxton, Kid Lucky, Liberty
Ellman, Amina Claudine Meyers, Jeff Parker, Handsome Furs, Robert
Mitchell, Quest Love, Julius Hemphill Sextet, Merce Cunningham, Okkyung
Lee, Joe Maneri, Beans, Bill T Jones, Josh Abrams, Chad Taylor, Dave
Douglas and John Herndon, John King, among many others. She has recorded
as a guest musician with rock, pop, and electronic groups as diverse as
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, TV On The Radio, Savath & Savalas,
Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Deerhoof and performance artists My Barbarian. She
also continues to work as a sidewoman on a plethora of collaborative
projects exploring a variety of artistic mediums.
Since the release of her last record, she has been extensively
traveling, exploring parts of the American south, western Europe,
Africa, Indonesia, and India by air, train, and water. These voyages
have allowed her to build on a personal archive of experience which has
inspired much of her work to date, with a thematic focus on migration,
memory, sound, and the place of history in uncertain times. Roberts is
also a 2019 DAAD fellow in music composition.
Of her work, Matana says the following:
"At my artistic core, I am firmly dedicated to creating a unique and
very personal body of sound work that speaks to, and reminds people of
all walks of life to reach, stand up, give voice, regardless of
difference, created from mere labels of intellectual classification. In
my ideal world the idea of 'difference', is an illusion designed only
for modern economic division and elitist intellectual hierarchy. Through
my life's work, I stand creatively in defiance."
I am a mixed media sound artist,
saxophonist and composer. I do not live in Indonesia, but band camp
won't let me just say "Earth". I also tried "Saturn", but that didn't
work either:). Thank you for supporting my work.
Multidisciplinary
visionary Matana Roberts' panoramic sound quilting explores African
American history, spirituality, folklore and her ancestral roots. Her
21st-century liberation music has birthed an ambitious 12-album series,
the latest being Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis. Roberts
confronts the nightmarish rituals of the Ku Klux Klan on the
gut-wrenching "All Things Beautiful," which opens to a raucous
blues-edged cacophony of horns that unfold her harrowing and
time-stopping narrative. --Monifa Brown
A Quietus Interview A Thing Of Beauty A Crime Scene: Matana Roberts Interviewed by Adam Quarshie September 26, 2019 6:47
Ahead of her performance as part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s People’s Forest season, Adam Quarshie spoke to visionary US jazz musician and storyteller Matana Roberts about the role of nature in shaping her creativity
Portrait by M. Tarantelli
“There’s something really interesting to me about what being in nature can do for you”, says Matana Roberts, reflecting on the role of the natural world in shaping her creative practice. For the Chicago-born sax player and multi-media artist, reconnecting with nature has become a vital route to emotional equilibrium and a key component of her creativity. “People talk about forest bathing now. It’s this idea of immersion. It brings a certain kind of balance and peace.”
Best known for her COIN COIN project - a wildly ambitious 12-album series, released through Montreal-based Constellation Records - Roberts disassembles US jazz traditions in order to transform them into a profound and visionary storytelling medium. Through her sax playing, field recordings, spoken word and singing, she explores aspects of American history, ancestry and race, with a focus on oral history, family narratives and mythology. A frequent traveller, much of her work has drawn on journeys she has made through the US South, particularly in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, while voyages to parts of Asia and Africa over the past two years have also begun filtering into her work.
Recently commissioned as part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s People’s Forest- an arts programme exploring the history and culture of Epping Forest - she’s in the process of putting together “a mixed media installation piece” which will be performed in St Mary’s Church in Walthamstow. Though she now splits her time between the US and Europe, Roberts was stateside when I up caught with her over the phone. Like her music, our conversation was deeply enriching and illuminating, covering everything from free diving in Indonesia and visiting slave castles in Ghana to living on boats in Brooklyn. <a href="http://matana-roberts.bandcamp.com/album/for-standing-rock">For Standing Rock... by Matana Roberts</a>
Given that I have called her to talk about forests, I’m surprised to find that we actually spend a considerable chunk of our conversation talking about the sea. “I’m really into cold water, ice swimming and things like that”, she tells me. “I started surfing in New York City, in a place called Far Rockaway. I got so into it that I started surfing even when it was cold and I realised that I really like being in cold water. In London, sometimes I go to the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond in winter, for the fact that it’s cold.”
This fascination with water partly came about due to having spent several years living on houseboats in Brooklyn, (in an area that had, incidentally, once between notorious as a spot for the mafia to dump bodies). It was a time in her life that would prove to have far-reaching consequences. “I learned so much from doing that. It makes you think about the world and your place in it in a lot of new ways. Just in terms of your impact on the environment.”
But being in water was also a way of dealing with a traumatic experience she’d had in her 20s. “I almost drowned in a lake. I’ll never forget it: it was a beautiful lake, and it had this dock in the middle where all these kids were swimming to, and I thought,“Oh, I can swim to that”. I got halfway there and when I realised I couldn’t feel the bottom, I had a panic attack. And my friend at the time had to come, I almost killed him. He kept telling me to flip over to float on my back, and for a little while there, I was not hearing him. I stayed away from water for a really long time after that.”
It was the death of her mother in 2010 following a long struggle with cancer that provided the impetus for overcoming this fear. “I was going through this period where you long for the things that your parents used to do”, she says. “My mother was a swimmer, she talked about swimming in a Chicago Southside area called ‘The Point’. And so I decided that I wanted to get back into water." But this rediscovery of the joys of being in water coincided with a realisation of the barriers to access that often surround it: “Water recreation has become, in certain parts of the world, a very colonised thing, where only certain types of people get access. That started to piss me off.”
She began linking the modern tendency for watersports to be a playground for the privileged to the history of racial segregation of public spaces in the US, including beaches. This was partly the result of discovering a bunch of old family photos, most of which were taken at segregated beaches in the US South in the 1920s and 30s, as well as on the shore of Lake Michigan, near Chicago, in the 1950s. “These were places that were colonised in a different sort of way”, she says, “and I decided I wanted to dig into it more.”
Since then, watersports of different kinds - including kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding - have become part of Roberts’ constant creative and personal exploration. During a trip to Indonesia earlier this year, she first came into contact with free diving. Though it has become a competitive sport, free diving - diving on one breath, without the use of an oxygen tank - has long been a key survival tool for many indigenous peoples across Southeast Asia. As Roberts explains: “I’m not interested in the competition. I’m interested in the utilitarian value of what it meant to indigenous people, because it was a form of sustenance. That’s how people procured fish.” As well as an interest in human endurance and survival skills, Roberts describes “a really strong link between some sort of physical practice and my art practice. The way in which free divers use their lungs is something I’m very curious about as a saxophonist. I do a lot of the breathwork that I learned in my saxophone practice now.”
Portrait by M. Tarantelli
There’s a further aspect of the sea that strongly informs Robert’s work: its role in facilitating the forced migration of Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “All of our bloodlines have ended up where they have because of this ability to make it across bodies of water, whether by force or by choice.” This was something that she reflected on heavily during one of her many recent voyages. “I took a cargo trip this year from Liverpool, England to Halifax, Nova Scotia”, she tells me. “That took 12 days. It was long enough, I tell you! I couldn’t wait to get off that boat after it was over. But a hundred years ago that trip would have taken months."
As an African-American artist with a deep commitment to exploring her place in her country’s often violent history, the cargo ship trip took on an added resonance. She describes being onboard “and having the freedom to go hang out on the decks whenever I felt like it. Sometimes I’d do it at two in the morning, sometimes I’d be there at nine in the morning.” She experienced “the joy of being able to look out on the horizon and see so much beauty” as well as “the cognitive dissonance of what was it like to be chained on these ships, [and] brought up to the deck.”
Given her nomadic tendencies and her fascination with migration, it was perhaps inevitable that she would eventually make the reverse trip across the Atlantic, from the United States to Africa, which she managed to do last year. “Growing up African-American, in the black radical tradition, I was constantly immersed in history. Africa was this looming thing of beauty that was always spoken about in a very specific kind of way. It was a very emotional thing for me to go there.” During her flight, the realisation of what she was doing struck her. “I remember when I looked on the plane map and saw that we were flying over the Sahara, I started crying. I was going to Africa, and I was bringing an entire legacy of people with me on my back”.
She had the opportunity to go to Ivory Coast and Ghana, visiting slave forts in the latter. She recorded her experiences in several ways, including journals, field recordings and audio diaries. Her experiences in the slave forts brought home the reality of the violence and disruption brought by colonialism: “It’s amazing that they’re there for educational purposes, but at the same time, you go to one slave castle, you really don’t need to go to another. I felt deeply terrorised in those spaces.” The sound of the sea also played a crucial role. “I get so much pleasure from water. It brings me so much peace and happiness.” Yet she was constantly aware that the sounds she enjoyed would have had completely different meanings for her ancestors: “I come from a lineage of people who were terrorised by those sounds. [For enslaved people], those were not sounds of joy or pleasure”.
Portrait by Evan Hunter McKnight
Her interests in nature, migration and history eventually began to coalesce and push her towards a project centred on forests. A chance meeting with Luke Turner, co-founder of this site and author of Out Of The Woods, a book on the social, cultural and sexual history of Epping Forest, provided the spark. “We had a curious conversation on Twitter”, she says. “I was reading a couple of really interesting books by naturalist writers and we started having a discussion about the forest.” This conversation soon turned to sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin, and her novella The Word For World Is Forest. Written in the immediate wake of the Vietnam War, the book contains a powerful critique of racism and colonialism, underpinned by an environmentalist ethos. It tells the story of the forest-dwelling Athsheans, whose planet is colonised by humans who enslave the indigenous population, suppress their traditional knowledge and way of life, and log their forests.
“I saw that as a commentary on the way in which the world moves”, reflects Roberts. “The history of the world is a history of violence.” Yet forests have often acted as refuges for those escaping violence and oppression. “I think about that a lot, in terms of the history of the Underground Railroad [the network of hidden routes and safe houses that helped escaped slaves find safety in the northern US and Canada], how Harriet Tubman was leading people through the forest to freedom.”
Much of her work on COIN COIN has explored similar themes. Coin Coin was in fact the name given to a woman born Marie Thérèse Metoyer, an enslaved woman born in mid-1700s Louisiana who was later able to purchase her freedom, going on to found one of the first settlements of free people of colour in the American South. Roberts’ upcoming album, the forth chapter of COIN COIN, entitled Memphis, is based on a tale that was passed down to her by her grandparents. “It tells the story of a woman, who I’m related to, whose parents were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. She escaped and lived in the forest, in an area that divided the black side of town and the white side of town. She lived there for many months by herself as a child.” This harrowing story of racial transgression and violence (the woman’s father, according to the story, had been white, and was killed for taking his wife, who was of mixed white and African-American heritage, to a white church) is an example of how the grand narratives of race and power can play out in the context of one family’s life. But it also got her thinking about the role of the forest “as a place of safety and liberation.”
Epping Forest, which straddles both multicultural and predominantly white areas of Northeast London and Essex, also became a space for exploring the complex interplay between nature and sociopolitical forces. But it was the supernatural elements of the area’s history that struck her. “It’s interesting to think of the forest as a thing of beauty. But it’s also like a crime scene. Things have happened there that you might not even think of." She mentions tales of Wicca covens and animal sacrifices that have come to be associated with the area. The idea of the forest as a portal to the spirit world is particularly attractive to her: “Every time I walk through a graveyard, if I see the name on a gravestone, like if the person is Arthur something, I’ll say, ‘Hi Arthur, I hope you’re doing great’”, she says. “I really do believe the body has a time limit but the soul is timeless. I believe that the spirit world is indeed a real thing and that in these spaces, especially spaces that hold so much history, spirits remain there and you can feel them. Music is my way of touching that world.”
This approach to music, as a gateway between worlds and ways of knowing, is reflected in her performance. “I hate this idea of the audience and the performer. I’ve never liked that. I like the idea of witness: we’re all in witness and we’re all in fellowship together. Not in a religious sense. When you put a bunch of bodies in one space that don’t know each other, this vibration of hope sits in the room. I want to figure out different ways that I can feel that.” This is especially pertinent given the political tensions of the current moment. She mentions “what’s going on in the current presidential administration. It’s like these people would like us to be back in 1954 or 1932”. Live music, by contrast, is a way of building immediate community between people who don’t know each other. When she plays, “It’s just instant community. You have people in the room that may not like each other after they leave. But in that moment, there’s love.”
Matana Roberts’ performance as part of the People’s Forest will take place at St Mary’s Church, Walthamstow, on 4 October
COIN COIN Chapter 4: Memphis is released on Constellation Records on 18 October
Roulette is pleased to welcome back composer, saxophonist, and sound experimentalist Matana Roberts for the much-anticipated fourth installment of her hugely innovative, profoundly iconoclastic and acclaimed COIN COIN project. This project is described as a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community, and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. COIN COIN has been widely and highly praised for its stylistic innovations and narrative power. Noted music critic Peter Margasak wrote of COIN COIN: “Memory is a powerful thing, but it’s so private, fluid, and unreliable that it can seem almost impossible to capture in a work of art—and history is often no more stable, once you look closely enough. Roberts has succeeded at evoking both, though, and gives her audience a long look at something ghostly, tragic, and beautiful. She is carving out her own aesthetic space, startling in its originality and gripping in its historic and social power.”
In its latest chapter, Memphis, Roberts deftly weaves a sonic tapestry of African-American ethnography and history with strands of jazz, blues, free improv, afro-futurism, traditionals, spoken word, and avant-garde composition – always guided by her powerfully personal/universal narratives and wholehearted, singular artistic spirit.
Roberts will be joined by a stellar band of collaborators including Hannah Marcus, Ryan Sawyer, Matt Lavelle, Stuart Bogie, Kyp Malone, and Meshell Ndegeocello on bass.
Matana Roberts is an internationally recognized, Chicago-born saxophonist and multidisciplinary sound conceptualist working in various mediums of performance inquiry. She has created alongside visionary experimentalists of this time period in various areas of improvisation, dance, poetry, visual art, theater; as a saxophonist, documented on various sound recordings as collaborator, side woman and leader. Her recent work focused on the place / problem of memory and tradition as recognized deciphered, deconstructed, interrogated through radical modes of sound communication, alternative styles of musical notation, and multi-genres of improvisation. Roberts’ work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), Fridman Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit). She is well-known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression. Constellation Records began documenting the Coin Coin project in 2011 and has released the first three of a projected twelve album-length chapters to date.
In
the fourth volume of a proposed 12-part suite, the saxophonist fuses
free jazz and folk spirituals into an ecstatic confrontation with
American history at its darkest.
Time has no steady rhythm, despite what a clock insists. Matana Roberts,
who might agree, saw how the tempo of history seemed to move
irregularly through both her own memory and the national one: how choice
points seemed to speed up, wane, cut, coda, and hold; how nostalgia
coddled, unsettled, blurred, and muzzled moments. “The past: It sits
there,” she said in a 2016 interview, pausing to savor a delicious silence, “but it moves.”
Roberts is one of those artists permanently disturbed by the wing of a
single, broad muse—here the muse being America, boiled in its own
blood, disquiet, mettle, and hate. Her self-appointed task across a
projected 12-part album suite of what can unsatisfyingly be bucketed as
free-jazz (but in reality is more like historical fiction accompanied by
a loud bouquet of horns, ouds, and vibraphones) is akin to what
essayist Elizabeth Hardwick selects as her lodestar on the first page of
her best, wooziest, and final work, Sleepless Nights. “This is
what I have decided to do with my life,” she writes. “I will do this
work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life.” Like
Hardwick, Roberts has a firm sense of purpose and a fabulist’s impulse,
beginning with a vision of the past—on this album, memories of a young
woman whose parents were killed by the Klan, a story loaned to her by
her Memphis-born grandmother—and using it as kindling to cannon a
hailstorm of paean and shrapnel.
History, as it often does, crashes in with savagery. Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis is like the other three extant Coin Coins
inasmuch as it’s marked by a tumbling of psychic and cosmic ephemera,
allowing free improv, folk spirituals, and guttural yawps from throat
and sax to mimic the beatitude of a woman’s disguises, passions, and
dignity against the thrashings of circumstance. This effort, however,
feels firmer, and more fulgid. In this sharper focus, Roberts’
subtractions have an additive effect: Whereas Coin Coin Chapters One, Two, and Three approach women as platforms by which to explode outward into sound, Coin Coin ChapterFour: Memphis
focuses more tightly on myth-making by channeling the protagonist in a
broadly narrative form. We learn of her father, of her grandmother, of
her prayers for safety, and watch Roberts narrate as a vessel for her
spiritspeak.
Both the pieces that utilize her
voice—which is most satisfying in a tranced-out, babble-as-hymnal
mode—and those that are voiceless somehow summon the sensation that she
and her band have swallowed their instruments so as to transcend them.
Roberts’ saxophone in the prologue, “Jewels of the Sky:
Inscription”—which capitalizes on the horn’s capacity to blare like what
one imagines the sun might sound like if it were played (low, eruptive,
juicy)—is divine noodling, astral magma. The epilogue, “How Bright They
Shine,” ends on deep, reedy emissions like dispatches from a satellite
stuck in time and orbit.
Space feels grounded in Roberts’ work, though. Mirages of Chicago’s
free-jazz heroes—of which Roberts is now resolutely one—mist through
inescapably, but so does the city of Memphis. To call upon Memphis as a
signifier of place and time is a choice that irresistibly forces images
of its past to projectile into the present: the stuff of Sun and Stax,
the Southern rag, Three 6 Mafia, Johnny Cash,
the blues. This isn’t to say that she sounds directly reminiscent of
them, but instead assumes herself as part of a cultural lineage devoted
to confronting the darkness, the grimness, the apocrypha of the South.
She summons the same dramatic tensions that surface when staring at a
Confederate statue still erect in 2019.
At the substrate, Roberts’ work is that of a woman in thrall to the
legacies of family and history, but so sensitive to the sharp pains and
violent rearrangements of a national consciousness that she needs to
experience them instrumentally, which is to say, through her body. In a recent interview with The Quietus,
Roberts devotes a large part of her conversation to a fascination with
the idea of moving through water as experienced by indigineous and
African-American bodies during the transatlantic slave trade. “The way
in which free divers use their lungs is something I’m very curious about
as a saxophonist,” she says of deep-sea diving without an oxygen tank, a
new hobby. “I do a lot of the breathwork that I learned in my saxophone
practice now.” That phrase—breathwork—sums the brio and intensity of
Roberts’ vision. It should come as no surprise that respiration and
inspiration come from the same Latin root, spir: ‘‘to breathe.”
The force of Roberts’ breath—first through the saxophone, all endurance
and fits and starts; then through time, inflated and vivified—makes
bold how much the retelling of history is a necessary game of
survival—an ongoing, fluid act of resuscitating the dead.
Toward the end of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick closes in on her own memory-remaking with a lapidary line that may as well have come from a chorus in the middle of Memphis:
“The weak have the purest sense of history.” It takes no effort to
imagine Roberts chanting it in one of her fugue states, reaching
crescendo as she stacks the words like a highway pile-up: The weak have the purest sense of history; the weak havethepurestsense of history, theweakhavethepurestsenseofhistory…
Roberts’ history-making is impure in a literal, fundamental way—that
is, part patchwork, part arch composure, part sacrament—but it’s all
extremely real. What she does here, and what she will continue to do, is
allow her body’s blood to beat loudly enough so that it matches the
irregular rhythms of the past. She inhales and exhales life into memory
so as to make it new—or, maybe more accurately, she affords history the
brief freedom to breathe.
Power Greater Than Itself:
Celebrating the AACM in Guelph
Ancient to the Future: Celebrating 40 years of the AACM
With Douglas Ewart, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe
Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, , Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Wadada
Leo Smith Corey Wilkes.
Friday, September 9, 2005
Macdonald Stewart Art Centre ; Guelph Jazz Festival
Transcription by Marianne Trudel and Bill Shoemaker Technical Note: Audience
members asked questions off-mic. Sometimes, their questions were
prefaced with lengthy statements that were not fully audible, and have
been summarized. Their questions have been transcribed as completely as
possible.
Douglas Ewart:
Good morning everyone, on the behalf of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians, we would like to extend the warmest
greetings to each and every one of you. For those of you who may not
know, the Association is celebrating its 40th year of existence this
year, and what we thought we would do this morning is have each one of
the panelists speak a little bit about the relevance and the importance
of the association to them in their lives. So, I would like to start
this morning maybe having Roscoe Mitchell speak. We will have each
panelist make a statement for approximately three to five minutes, and
then we will field some questions from you.
Roscoe Mitchell:
Thank you Douglas. Well, I would say that the AACM is very important in
my life. It is been an important vehicle for many people that I have
met through the years and I would consider myself to be lucky to have
been in Chicago at the time the AACM started and I would look back to
the experimental band of Muhal Richard Abrams, is where these ideas
started to formulate. Back in the 60s, Muhal had an experimental band.
We met every Monday night and there we were all encouraged to write our
own original compositions, bring them in to the band, and get them heard
and so on. Those were the early seeds for the AACM: people started to
talk, musicians had taken a look to what had happened to some of the
great musicians that came before us, who really didn’t have real
connections with each other and then people started to think: We want to
have an organization where we can be more in control of our own
destinies. We wanted to have a place where we could sponsor each other
in concerts of our original compositions, provide a training program for
young aspiring musicians in the community, reach out to other people
and other cities and have exchange programs. It was around that time
after the AACM was formed that I met Lester Bowie who had come from
St-Louis and there was many musicians that we met through Lester Bowie
and we started exchange programs. Later on I moved to Michigan and I
formed the CAC, the Creative Arts Collective . We maintained
the same basic fundamental principles of sponsoring the members in
concerts and having exchange programs with musicians from other cities
in effort to be in control of our own destinies and provide employment
for musicians. Even the schools on some levels became involved with
that. Back there you had Richard Teitelbaum who was teaching here in
Toronto at York University. They were concerts in Toronto, many concerts
in Toronto at that time. Many of the student groups formed groups
inside of the University so that they could have a say in the different
musicians that they were bringing in to the campuses other than just a
status quo. So, to me, the AACM is more than an organization. It is a
lifestyle. And, I am constantly reminded what the AACM is meant to so
many people when I go out to do concerts and people come up to me and
they express to me their experiences upon hearing the musicians from the
AACM for the first time and how it affects their lives and the lives of
their children.
DE: Wadada Leo Smith.
Wadada Leo Smith:
Okay. What can I say? All of you are here to hear us talk about the
AACM. That is probably important. I guess the most important thing that I
would like to relate to you about the AACM is the notion of community.
The whole idea that the structure of community is based around not just
existence but an ongoing revolution, new ideas, a new way of thinking
and an idea that is based on the actuality that once you come up with a
beautiful idea, you have to put it into effect. And, from that, the
community grows and expands, you know, and the idea of that, which is
really great and benefits to the whole community in every way, also
expands. And you can see that by the kind of artistic communities that
have been formed around the world. That’s the most important part. Thank
you.
DE: Donald Moye
Famoudou Don Moye:
Good morning. Roscoe Mitchell and Leo stated it pretty well, I don’t
have a lot to add to that except that it has been and it remains to be a
power stronger than itself.
DE: Jaribu Shahid.
Jaribu Shahid:
Good morning. Coming from Detroit, I guess I can speak on more of a
cursory relationship with the AACM, how important it was for us when we
were trying to develop our music to know that such an institution
existed, that it was possible for an institution like this to exist. And
that people that could involve themselves in the community, that would
allow for different kinds of thinking musically. I was involved with the
Creative Arts Collective in Detroit and it allowed us to do
concerts. It’s where I met Roscoe and we had Anthony Braxton and Muhal
and Douglas and a number of people came in to work with us and I can
speak about how it influenced a lot of musicians in Detroit and I am
sure in a lot of other cities, as well. It’s like a pebble dropped into a
lake and the ripple effect is still being felt. There are a number of
people who come after this who kind of want to act like this didn’t
happen. I think it is important for us to realize the importance that
these individuals here and a lot who are not here anymore have made in
the world of music.
DE: I would like to introduce our vice-chairman or chairwoman: Nicole Mitchell. Chairperson? Chairwoman!
Nicole Mitchell: Chairwoman! ‘Cause that means evidence.
DE: Yes.
NM: I have been
in the AACM since 1995, so, a lot happened before I came and it is
important for me to just to state that the AACM is like a family, it is a
mentorship and the beauty of it is, as Roscoe says, the community but
also because now we have such a great sharing between generations and at
the same time there is this legacy. So we have this great history and
legacy and yet we keep to the philosophy of striving for your own voice
and to complete that goal of creating original music and that is what I
always tried to do and it is very important to me because I am kind of
in between, like I have been around for ten years and at the same time
there is a lot of younger members coming in, and I feel like a bridge,
that I have to bridge the gap between those that came before me and have
brought so much and have taken so much responsibility to bring us to
where we are today and those who are coming in that are still new to the
ideas and to coming into these relationships with people because that
is what it is about: it is about relationships with people; it is an
association. And that has brought so much wealth to me to be able to
connect with all these different perspectives on music, on life, and, at
the same time, have that diversity celebrated. And that is what I think
is a real strength of the organization. And, the ideas and the
possibilities have not even come close to being realized. It is just up
to us to realize the power of the vehicle and be able to bring it
forward into the next future that we are into now.
DE: I would like to introduce our next speaker: Matana Roberts.
Matana Roberts:
Good morning. What the AACM has meant to me … I grew up on the music
of the AACM through my father who would take me to concerts, play me
record after record after record. And, it has created in me, since
becoming a member of the Association I think in 2001or 2000, it’s meant a
sense of knowing who I am, it has given me a better sense because for
the moment I don’t live in Chicago, I live in New York City, and I was
thinking about a good way to describe it. It is like being dangled from a
skyscraper but I have a bunch of cords (laughs) so, I am not going to
fall too far even if I fall. The AACM has and is still giving me such a
sense of community and being involved as it did when I was in Chicago at
the AACM School and teaching children. The ability of the AACM to go
back to community to give, I really don’t think that there are enough
musicians and artists that are doing that in such a way that the AACM
has continued to do so over number of years. And the other thing about
the AACM for me is, it is taught me that I can be as free, as open, and
as creative as I want to be. I have so many people to look up to, to see
that I can fly like that too, I can go in that direction if I want to
do that and the standard of musicianship and the standard of
music-making is at such a level that it is inspiring. So, that is what
is for me.
DE: Corey Wilkes.
Corey Wilkes:
Good morning. I think I am one the most recent member of the AACM, about
a whole week now (laughs). But I have been performing with musicians of
the AACM over the last two to five years, roughly. Being a part of the
AACM now or I should say from the outside looking in, it meant
creativity, freedom and unity which is the most important and the
understanding that you have to go all the way out in order to explore
yourself, you can’t never understand everything if you don’t go out of
the box. You have to go out of the box to go in, you know. So, exploring
that freedom in your music and lifestyle is going to help you to live
and make you go a long way.
DE: I am caught chewing a grape (laughs). I wanted to say that the panel reflects the resilience of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
. We have several generations of AACM membership here and one of the
things people often ask me is: Why is it that the AACM has existed for
as long as it has? Because the era which the organization was formed,
many organizations were formed; not just musical but political and from
the visual arts, from the writers’ areas and so forth. And I said to
them that I think it is the flexibility that we have within the
organization. It is not that we are friction free but we always advocate
for each other no matter what is going on, there is always someone
there to say: This is the way this person is and we should accept them
in this way. That does not mean that they should transform themselves in
some way but that acceptance of who we are right now, now is the time,
now is always the time. So, you have to accept in order to have
transformation. In order to have a development, you have to accept where
you are as a person and where other people are as individuals. I think
that is one the strongest aspects of the organization for me having gone
through the stage of being a student, one of the earliest students at
the Association School of Music which was formulated in October,
formally, in October 1967. And, I am sitting a couple of chairs from one
my first teachers, Roscoe Mitchell. So, we can see, the development of
the Organization where the idea is to always foster new spirits, new
souls, and that is evidenced right here, today. I think at this point we
can get some questions or comments from the audience and since we only
have a few minutes, we would like everybody to speak at once (laughs).
Audience Member 1,
a musician from Mexico interested in how to make the AACM work in his
community: How to deal with youngsters? How to make our audiences
younger? How to make people understand and love the music? What did you
do? What does the AACM does? And what would you suggest for us to do?
RM: I have
always felt that we owe a responsibility to our younger people; that is
to pass on the tradition. In fact, when I was growing up, this is the
way it used to be. During those times, if someone was doing something
that you wanted to learn how to do, the only thing you had to show them
was that you were really interested and wanted to know that, and they
would show you that. And, certainly, I have lived in a time when this
was happening, but it is a thing that you have to nurture. I mean, you
can’t expect young people to know anything about anything if you don’t
expose them to any of these things. It was different when I was growing
up because you could almost talk to anybody and they knew something
about everything, but now it is not like that anymore. So, it is
probably time to re-nurture the young. They have to be exposed to these
things in order to know them and what I felt about this music is that,
from my own point of view, it takes a long time to get to be what I
would like to be. And then, I have also found out, maybe some people
thought that this music stopped, but it doesn’t stop. In my case, I
could say that maybe some things that I thought about in the 60s, I
started to compose now. So, it is a question of involvement. Back then,
you would not only have a festival, you would have concerts that go on
through out the year, I mean, on a smaller scale. I mean, you don’t
bring everybody for one concert. It’s back to the old thing of exposure.
I will give you an other example: listening to the radio as a young
person, on one particular station you might hear a variety of different
things throughout the whole day and everybody knew, no matter if it was a
song from jazz or a popular song or a religious song or the blues or
whatever, everybody was always exposed to all of these things. Now we
have radio that plays the same songs over and over and over, so there,
you don’t have any exposure. I think it is good that jazz went to
colleges but maybe it is not that great because there is no focus put on
any music that is creative. It used to be, if I go back to the 60s, you
might go to a concert at a college and there you could see a wide
variety of programming at a college. It might be the Art Ensemble there,
it might be John Cage. I am just giving these two examples because that
is a far-stretched example; but what we noticed is that people could
make up their own minds about the things they want to listen to. People
should be exposed to things, and then they can have some choices, and
they are not given the choice, then that it starts to cut off the
different avenues that they might choose or think about.
DE: Nicole?
NM: I was going
to say for your community, I am sure that there’s lots of musicians
that play this creative music that you are interested in and there’s
ways of creating programs for the youth. For example, when I was on my
way here, I went to Ann Arbor and my band performed at an elementary
school and I brought one of the pieces was that I wrote with graphic
notation and I showed them what we were playing and explained different
shapes and then we played it. And this school happened to have a music
program where they had recorders, so then I gave the music teacher a
copy of the music so that they could try to play it later. And, there’s
lot of ways to do that, to expose the youth to this music, especially
those that are learning instruments already because they come up and
they don’t just get the chance to find out about it until they are worn
out in a lot of cases. And the younger they can be exposed to it the
more, you know, I mean they are so open. I had a little five-year-old
scat to an atonal piece. She was like: Can I play your flute? Can I play
your flute? And I said: You need to go home and tell your parents you
want to play the flute, and I know when she went home that day that she
went home to ask for a flute. So, I think that is really just about
finding creative ways and then it is good for the artists to because we
really enjoy sharing so finding ways that your local musicians to do
more programs in the schools and educational situations.
Audience Member 2:
I wanted to ask if the AACM came out in a very turbulent time, socially
and culturally. How has that influenced the creation of the AACM and
how has that maintained or sustained itself as you move into different
generation and extend out to younger people?
DE: Well, the
60s -- we say it is a turbulent time but I think it is always a
turbulent time, particularly for our experiences, black people on the
planet and coming out of Chicago were the most segregated and still to
this day, here the change is made but if you ride public transportation
it is very visceral, what occurs ,as soon as you get to a certain place,
the train makes a transformation. I happened to teach at a institution
in Chicago, the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and it is very
interesting that I have to make my students go into the South Side by
planning field trips that forced them into that community because there
is still that fear of black people that they had grown up with and that
is enhanced in a sense by many institutions whether directly or
indirectly because they don’t plan anything that occurs in the
community. They will bring black people to the school but they won’t go
where black people are, so, I think, for us we always had to adapt.
Self-determination is what the organization was founded on. When the
organization developed, one of the reasons it that was so crucial was
some of the sources of outlet for us were drying up, places that the
music was once been able to be heard were being systematically closed
down. I don’t want to go to far afield but politics is an important part
of everyday life, daily, and the climate was very difficult for black
musicians particularly to survive in Chicago so, we had to device a
method in which to survive and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
provided that platform because we were self-producing, we did our own
posters, our own distribution, and started our own recording companies,
and so on. And it is still as important today as it was in the 60s and
one of the things Roscoe mentioned was, you know, we are in such a hurry
now, you know, if an idea is more than a day old it is no longer
relevant. I think one of the things, when we think about creativity is
not just music but even the first toys that kids play with: we have kids
that play with things that they don’t make themselves, that they can’t
fix, things of that nature. I think creativity is on a lot of levels and
we have to think about that. So, when we are thinking about creativity,
we can start by improvising with our children, pots and pans, pencils,
just giving them a wider imagination and more control over what is it
you do, what the kids eat, where they eat, all of these things are
related to creativity. Kids don’t know how to cook now because everybody
eats out, and they don’t even know what good food is, so, those are
some of the things that we need to think about when we think about
creativity and not just in terms of music and painting, but creativity
in every aspect of survival, and thriving rather than just surviving.
Any other questions?
Audience Member 3:
I was wondering, in the early stages, what ensembles, what groups there
were. I know Leroy Jenkins and Muhal Richard Abrams were important in
the early stages. What were they playing?
RM: The AACM is
always been an organization of small groups and large bands. Out of the
AACM, you mentioned a couple of groups but they were several others:
Joseph Jarman’s quartet, with Christopher Gaddy and Charles Clark , both
of those musicians have passed on. Wadada Leo Smith groups, groups with
Anthony and Wadada and Leroy Jenkins and so on. We have always made a
practice of large ensembles and smaller ensembles. In fact, the AACM is a
group of people that has instruments that people don’t even have. I
mean, in order to really see the AACM full blown, opportunities would
have to be presented so that it would be possible to present some of
these situations. Speaking from my own point of view, I have a
percussion set-up that I have been developing since the 60s which is
10”x10” floor space and I have all these instruments that I have been
collecting from all over the world and so on. But, I go back to when
jazz went to college. It is a good thing if you reflect things that are
already happened but you also have to keep yourself in tune with what is
going on now you see. He was talking about the political situation:
back in my times, you had a lot of individual thinkers, which you don’t
have now and then people functioned in certain roles for a certain
amount of time and then it might be time for them to move on to other
parts of their lives. The problem that I see that happened is that no
one came to fill in these spaces with these great, great people who were
doing all these things. So, somewhere in there, there was a breakdown
but it stills goes back to: We have to stand for something. We have to
stand for something, we have to be individuals with visions and we can’t
just like change our vision just because it is something that is in
style today that wasn’t in style yesterday and that’s what a lot of
younger musicians today … (RM’s phone rings.) Excuse me. (To caller) I’m
going to pass you over to Douglas.
DE (taking phone): This is crucial everybody
RM: So, they
come to me and they are disillusioned. They said: OK, I went to college
and now I have to do this and now what? You know, whereas the AACM has
always been an organization that encouraged people to look inside and
find individuality, because once you do that, then you have an endless
source of energy to draw from. If you are not doing that, then you are
always placed in the position of waiting to see what everybody else does
and then trying to do that and it is difficult to be someone else but
it is really easy to be yourself. The main thing that you have to do is
to try to find out what your individual calling is and once you have
that you go on endlessly.
Audience Member 4
describes the role of socialism as the difference between ‘60s ideals
and “hip-hop” ideals: What kind of dialogue is happening between the
socialist model of the AACM and the more entrepreneurial model of the
hip-hop generation?
RM: Well, you
bring up a good point there. Now, what I would like to do is go back to
what I said earlier about people knowing about stuff. Hip-hop is popular
because it is an accepted art form that makes a lot of money, so, this
is what people like hearing all the time, you know. So now, there has to
be more situations created where people are interacting more like they
used to. I remember concerts in Chicago that were only musical concert …
AM4 interrupts to make a distinction about “underground hip-hop.”
DE: I think
that every form has its heights. There are hip-hop artists that are
doing strong work. I think any form has weak stuff in it, and because of
the commerciality of hip-hop, it has a lot more weaker forces, and
because you can captivate people with … Music is a really potent force
and what I have done with my classes as an experiment where we look at
-- I don’t want to call an artist name per se -- we looked at a piece
that was really denigrating women with the music. It was seductive. When
you turn the music down, people clamored for it to be turned off
immediately, and so we have to realize the magic of music – that it can
bring good things, and it can bring bad things. We have to watch that.
Wadada?
WLS: You know,
life is very hard when there is a disconnect. And there is a disconnect
essentially worldwide. I recommend that we need a consultation for what
it is coming. I think that the biggest problem with AACM and every other
kind of artistic community is that they have not had a consultation
among themselves about what they’re doing. This consultation will not
include how to make more money or how to get more personal power and
stuff like that. But it would be about how we engage the artistic
element to improve and strengthen our communities. In reconstruction
time, after Johnson and those guys that we call presidents education
didn’t make provisions for education for African-Americans and so,
African-Americans got together in each community and made those schools
and those churches. And, to do that, one individual doesn’t come up with
the idea how to do it. For example, teaching is a very important
process of socialization where you learn something and then you go
immediately teach it, you see. And the problem that I have learned is
that there’s a disconnect based on the fact that there is no
consultation, where you explore the dynamic range of what one particular
artistic community is doing, historically or otherwise, to see what is
possible. You know George Busch and all those clowns that run the United
States government, they have allowed thousands of people to die and
starve in this Katrina disaster. And, people were waiting for them to do
something and I don’t think they’re going to do anything. The best
thing to do is that, from a social point, is that African-Americans
should go back to that model after Reconstruction and not ask the
government, and not ask institutions to help them. Because until the
clear idea of preservation occurs, you are gonna have these issues
because the level of love and commitment worldwide regarding African
people on the whole planet is not only low but it probably not go lower,
you know?
MR: I just
wanted to address your question because I thought it was interesting,
being a person of African-American descent with a college degree. I have
sat in music classrooms and listened to teachers speak to
African-Americans students about music and It kind of goes along with
what Wadada Leo Smith was saying that there is this disconnect and I
think there is also a disconnect on in terms of education, in terms of
hip-hop and improvisation in music, there are all these links there and
what I feel like from being a student and also from teaching, I have
been teaching time to time, there is a disconnect between educators and
African-American students. I went to a predominantly white college in
Chicago but the one thing that saved me creatively was members of the
AACM because my particular college program did not care about creative
music, but that is a whole other story. I was a classically trained
person for a while and I had left that behind because I didn’t see
enough people that look like me amongst my peers and the history. As
beautiful as was Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, all of them, as beautiful as
those musicians and composers, I still didn’t see anybody that looked
like me, so I gravitated more toward jazz music for that reason and I
think that is why you see African-American students gravitate more
toward hip-hop. But what I think a lot of people understand about
hip-hop: the word hip-hop is the same as jazz. The word “jazz” covers a
wide range of music. It is ridiculous! The amounts of different types of
musicians and music under that one word, for the purpose of name a
genre so that you can sell music, I mean that is what labels are for.
So, hip-hop, to me, is the same sort of thing. Underground hip-hop --
it just describes a wide, wide range of music and I saw a lot of
educators that I dealt with at that time that kinda of threw it off as a
commercial thing but they weren’t really paying attention to people
that weren’t commercial and a lot of college educated African-Americans
are not … it is not about 50 Cents, it is not about Puff Daddy, any of
that, They are not really listening for that, they are looking for
something with more substance and there are a lot of hip-hop artists out
there that are like that. I think one thing that I do with small
children, which I don’t know if it is helpful, I mean, there is so many
great jazz records that have sampled over the last ten to twenty year
period and you can say what you want to say about sampling but at least,
they are bringing, with the exception of that awful situation with the
Beastie Boys and James Newton that was completely disgusting, but there
are other people that are doing it in a correct way in terms of giving
people credit. You take that music to these kids that are listening to
that and you play it for them and then you play them the record that the
music came of. That is how you have to start making those connections
with, you know, high schools students, and I don’t really know if that
has being done at the college level, but you have to find that
connection because young African-American college students are looking
for pieces of themselves that you can not find in white academia. I
could not find myself, the only reason why I found it was having a
strong family foundation and also Fred Anderson, people like that,
giving me opportunities and showing me by example that there are black
people that playing creative music. Just open your eyes and open your
ears, and here it is so, I think that that gap can be closed, but I
think on the part of educators, and I only speak of this because
educators have to work harder at closing that gap.
Audience Member 5:
I am interested in hearing how what processes there are for inviting
musicians into the collective and if that has changed over the years?
DE: It hasn’t
changed, really. As Roscoe said, one of the things that you have to do
is show an interest in the music, you have to come around the music, you
have to be recommended by a couple of people in good standing and then
the process go through the body of the AACM, where they deliberate as to
whether you would serve in a trial period of a year. During that year
you are expected to be an active member, to do all the things that is
necessary to help the organization go forward. Part of that is being
active in the schools, being active in the concerts, being active in
keeping the organization current, real, now, and learning about the
legacy of AACM, so that is pretty much in a nut shell what the process
is. You know, people, often want to become a part of something but it is
only for convenience sake. They really don’t want to invest themselves
in it. I know the process for me was a seamless kind of transition, just
being around. I remember sitting in the trumpet section next to Wadada,
learning from him, going to the AACM school, and then, I suddenly found
myself as a member. We have a more formal kind of induction now then it
was in the past, but pretty much the process is your commitment to the
music. We did get a phone call saying that Joseph Jarman is suffering
from food poisoning and, so, he wasn’t able to make it here. We had to
have somebody go over to his house. He had a doctor there and so forth,
so, I just wanted to relay that to you. That was the interruption.
Audience Member 6
was curious about the political and social implications of the Art
Ensemble: How did that translate to the music itself, or did it? Do you
see that or could feel that or did that somehow make it into the music,
that the music itself has political or social meanings? Maybe musical
freedom represents political freedom or did the music somehow embody
that?
WLS: How
are-you gonna separate that? You can not separate it. First of all, you
said the Art Ensemble, and actually meant the AACM because everybody in
the AACM is political. And everybody that is sitting out here in chairs
or standing, breathing, and pumping hot blood throughout their body is
also political. You can’t really ask a question like: How did you become
political? Maybe you have other intentions about what you want to find
out with that but won’t get much. So you want to rephrase it? How did
you become political? Are you political?
AM6: That is
not really what I was asking. What I was asking is: How did the music
itself embody some of the political ideas of the AACM, If at all, maybe
they don’t, I don’t know.
WLS: Do you consider Louis Armstrong political?
AM6: Yes.
WLS: Okay. How about Otis Redding?
AM6: I don’t know.
WLS: Well, it
is just like this. Everybody drinks the same water, OK, and being
political is something like getting up in the morning, brushing your
teeth, gargling, and then afterwards, drinking a glass of water. It is
part of your normal life. You don’t have to make your music something,
you, know. Your music is. Whatever you do is already what you are and
you don’t have to make yourself something, you are already that. Every
piece of music that a person produces, was it understood or not, says
exactly what it means in live in a society and be a part of that
society. Was that society some place that they feel that they need to
change everything in order to get everything to be right and equal, was
that status quo and that change basically the same thing? Sorry.
RM: It should
reflect life. I would like to back up just a little bit because I should
have recognized a person that is here today: Eugene Chadbourne. Eugene
Chadbourne, back in the early days, was very instrumental in helping to
see that different things happen, he ran The Parachute center out there
in Calgary. But I also mention that people move on in their life: Eugene
is also a great musician. He is got things that he needs to express in
his life, I mean, when we are sitting and listening to the music that
doesn’t say anything us, something is wrong there. And this is the
problem with the young people; they don’t have any music that they can
relate to. So, when History looks back at this period, they are gonna
see a dark period: nothing happened. We have such a great, great legacy
of music and art that we are privileged to look back upon and I have
always found that the things that I often go back to are the things that
were happening that, you know, related to the life at that time. I
mean, I would go out to hear John Coltrane in a club and the bandstand
was behind the bar. Now, how these people were serving drinks and doing
all that and it was that quiet, I will never know. Now, you can go out
hear music now, people are talking, they are not even listening to it:
it is not related to their lives. Certainly, we are not in that period
now in our lives. Eugene?
Eugene Chadbourne: Well,
since you mentioned me, I think you underestimate the younger
generation. All the comments that you make, not to pick an argument or
anything but, raising teenagers and having one of these houses where all
the teenagers come because I look the other way. But they are really
listening to an incredible range of music. I mean, I know 12 and 13 year
olds that are stoked with what is on the radio but it is amazing the
stuff they listen to. A lot of it is coming from the Internet. They are
listening to stuff I wish I could say: I know that because I played it
for you, but they didn’t pay any attention when I played it. But, they
are really listening to a lot of different music.
RM: Well,
Eugene, I am gonna ask you a question: Where are they? I mean, those
people I see are the people I have seen 20 years ago, I mean, it is
great to see everybody and everything but I don’t really see that many
young people. I was at the concert last night: I didn’t see that many
young people at the concert.
DE: Look in here. There are a few young people here but everybody is over 90 (Laughs)!
JS: I think it
reflects a great deal on what is available to them because they are
looking, like you are saying, but what is available to them is a much
smaller palette. I think that has to do with the globalization of all
the world’s resources and ideas in the hands of fewer and fewer people
and we got to take that back! (clapping, cheers) The AACM is an example
of just that, a community deciding to do something, and doing it
themselves. We keep looking for a handful of people to do these things
for us and he is absolutely right about that. The reason why hip-hop is
so big is because of how much money it makes. Because, some celebrations
of the lower aspects of all people makes money for a few people in
suits. It is used to be even major record companies had a strong jazz
department but not of these suits are in control. You have to understand
that the whole jazz catalogue makes less money that one of their pop
groups and as long as this is the only important point for them, then
that is all that is gonna be happening. So, I think, it is a world
community problem and as long as these few people are trying to make all
these decisions for other people, we gonna be all in trouble. This is a
world community problem.
DE: I don’t
want it to seem dismal. We know there are young people listening, there
are always a few people but we are looking at the whole situation. One
of the problems that we are facing for example is the fact that, in a
country like the United States, you can have somebody who can’t make a
sentence in charge. I mean seriously, I mean it is a problem. We know we
are in dire straits when you are in a situation like that. Some of the
people that voted, one of the sates that voted primarily for Bush is
experiencing it now: Louisiana. So, let’s not loose sight of what we are
talking about. It is not just listening to music; it is what happens to
you after you listened to the music. That is just like eating, just
like breathing, if you are not doing it correctly, you are gonna get
hurt. We can see about the air, about the food, and we have people
talking about how we don’t have a problem, there is no global warming.
All these things are related. We are not talking about music in some
kind of isolated chamber: we are talking about reality of existence. And
so, when we talk about notes and form, we talk about the universe that
we live in and so we have to be concerned. And yes, we are involved in
teaching young people to this day and we say this panel reflects quite
an array in terms of age and in terms of when people came to the
association. So we haven’t given up on the idea that young people are
our future: it is reflected here but we are talking about the strength
of the planet. Where are right now and where we are going. Where
resources have been squandered. If the people of the world were really
fired up, if the youth were really fired up, we would not be in Iraq.
Not that way. We would be thinking creatively. You know, 200 billion,
maybe 500 billion has been spent over there. And we are talking that
they have allocated 62 billions dollars to rebuild New Orleans, really
Louisiana and Mississippi. People haven’t talked about
Mississippi. Mississippi got a hit that was worse than New Orleans. New
Orleans is a manmade kind of devastation because of neglect, plus, we
got to be talking about young people reading, not just listening to
music. We talk about the whole spectrum. Any other questions because we
are at that time. Yes?
Audience Member 7 asked a question about how the AACM deals with current narrow mainstream media.
RM: Well, you
bring out a good point there. I mean, community radio stations, that is
on you guys. People that have the knowledge and so on, make sure that
the information gets passed around and so on. What is very odd about
where I live: there is really a good community radio station there, WRT,
that’s been there for 20 years and it is representative of the type of
radio that I listened to when I was growing up. I have always believed
you’re supposed to give people choices and they can make up their own
mind. When you go out in Madison, it is the total opposite. And, in
fact, Madison used to be one of the radical universities. When I first
got back from Europe and went there in 60s the whole of State Street was
full of teargas from student revolutions and so on. People don’t have
to do anything but it will go down. I mean, we don’t need all to be
puppets, just doing whatever anybody says. People have to have a clear
vision in their head of what they would like to do and stick to their
own vision and not be swayed. If you believe strong enough that you’re
thinking valid thoughts, if anything it’s going to be salvaged. In the
situation we’re in now, it’s going to take more than black people
getting out there to change it. By the way, my kids listen to music too,
they are influenced by me but if there is a situation that is gonna
exist where you are gonna bring a pool young people back in again … If I
look at Madison, some of the greats in this music have taught at
Madison. Cecil Taylor taught there, Bill Dixon, you see, so it is not a
situation that never did exist, but you have to reach out for these
people. You got to have things that go on in the universities and I have
taught in universities but the thing I don’t like about it is that it
is too much arguing going on: people defending their own political views
and so on and for a serious artist, it is not a good situation. Some
people can handle it better than others; I don’t handle it very well. In
some cases what I have done is I’ve withdrawn, because the work that I
am doing in this period I feel important because maybe I am starting to
really learn how to get to things that I am thinking about.
NM: I want to
address that part of your question about how we address the challenge of
helping others work more creatively. We have a lot of deep
personalities in our organization. I think that’s clear to everyone. I
found that when we have differences and we have clashes in terms of
ideas, all we have to do is go back to that love of the organization,
because that’s something that everyone has in common. We have different
perspectives about the organization and what we want to do through the
organization, but everyone involved has a deep love and respect and
determination for the organization to continue. When you focus on that
prosperity, that’s how you get things done without getting stuck in
personalities.
DE: I would like
to add something about the radio stations. There are some communities
stations that, when you get out there on the road, like we are, and you
have nothing but a CD player, the people who have the power in terms of
transmission power, of wattage power, in the Bible Belt, the narrow
conservative stuff, you hear people talking about assassinating Hugo
Chavez. I mean, we’re in trouble. The other thing about this
organization and any organization is that you need bridges, and people
who have connections. It’s these personal relationships that can provide
the bridge. Not everyone can be a bridge. And sometimes no one is
particularly is chosen, but they can provide the connections that
establish those bridges. And these things are necessary for this or any
other organization, because everyone cannot necessarily relate to
everyone else. When you’re a family, there’s going to be some stuff. If
there’s no stuff, it’s most likely not a family. So, we’re almost at the
beginning of the road, so maybe we’ll field one or two more questions
to wrap it up. Not everybody at once. So, we’d like to thank you on
behalf of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
New England Conservatory jazz alumna Matana Roberts ’03
M.M. is one of 20 individuals in the first class of Doris Duke Impact
Awards, presented by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Roberts will
receive an unrestricted cash grant of as much as $80,000.
The Impact Awards were announced April 22, alongside the third class
of Doris Duke Artist Awards since the program’s 2012 launch. NEC alumnus
Don Byron ’84 was among the initial group of Artist Award recipients.
Over the next five years the Doris Duke Foundation will fund the work
of 100 “artists who have influenced and are helping to move forward the
fields of dance, jazz and/or theatre,” through the Impact Awards,
according to a statement from the Foundation. Past Doris Duke Artist
Award recipients submit nominees for Impact Awards, and these
nominations are reviewed by a separate, anonymous panel of artists who
then select recipients from this pool. Read the DDCF Press Release:
Born in Chicago, alto saxophonist/composer Matana Roberts has been
based in New York City since completing her master’s degree at NEC. She
works in many performance/sound mediums including improvisation, dance,
poetry, and theater, and aims to expose the mystical roots and the
intuitive spirit raising traditions of American creative expression in
her music. Her current long-arc project, a 12-part music cycle called
Coin Coin, incorporates “Americana research, ancestral memory,
imaginative storytelling, instrumental improvisation and vocal
performance, which includes opera alternating with screams of joy,” and
has resulted in two recordings to date. She is a past member of the BRC:
Black Rock Coalition and the AACM: Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians.
NEC’s Jazz Studies Department was the first fully accredited jazz
studies program at a music conservatory. The brainchild of Gunther
Schuller, who moved quickly to incorporate jazz into the curriculum when
he became President of the Conservatory in 1967, the Jazz Studies
faculty has included six MacArthur “genius” grant recipients (three
currently teaching) and four NEA Jazz Masters, and alumni that reads
like a who’s who of jazz. Now in its 44th year, the program has spawned
numerous Grammy winning composers and performers. As Mike West writes in
JazzTimes: “NEC’s jazz studies department is among the most acclaimed
and successful in the world; so says the roster of visionary artists
that have comprised both its faculty and alumni.” The program currently
has 114 students; 67 undergraduate and 47 graduate students from 12
countries.
Born in 1975 in Chicago, Illinois, Roberts was raised on the city's South Side and studied classicalclarinet during her youth.[3] She formed a trio, Sticks and Stones, with bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor, with whom she regularly performed at the Velvet Lounge.[6] In 2002, Roberts moved to New York, initially busking in subways and publishing a zine, Fat Ragged, about her experiences.[6]
Roberts is the composer of Coin Coin, a multichapter musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry.[7][8] Roberts performed at the London Jazz Festival in 2007.[9] In 2008, Central Control released Roberts' The Chicago Project.[10] The album, produced by Vijay Iyer, includes performances by members of Prefuse 73 and Tortoise along with AACM saxophonist Fred Anderson.[11]
In January 2010, Roberts was the guest curator at The Stone.[12] Roberts was chosen by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that he curated in March 2012 in Minehead, England.[13] Roberts held a residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the summer of 2015, during which she produced a series of research-based sound works entitled i call america.[14] The following summer, she had a solo show at the Fridman Gallery entitled I Call America II that was presented as an expanded version of the Whitney exhibition.[15]
Longley, Martin (January 2010)."The Stone" (PDF). All About Jazz - New York. New York: Allaboutjazz.com (93): 7. Archived fromthe original (PDF) on July 14, 2010. Retrieved July 19, 2010.
Longley, Martin (January 2010). "The Stone"(PDF). All About Jazz - New York. New York: Allaboutjazz.com (93): 7. Archived from the original(PDF) on July 14, 2010. Retrieved July 19, 2010.
Saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts combines music, storytelling, and political activism. On the occasion of the release of Chapter Three in her ongoing Coin Coin series, Christopher Stackhouse prompts her to talk about her background and vision.
Matana Roberts, 2013. Photo by Evan Hunter McKnight.
I first encountered Matana Roberts
with saxophone in hand when she was leading a trio circa 1998 at
Chicago’s Empty Bottle as part of their long-running improvised music
series. Matana’s was among the most memorable of these gigs; she was one
of the youngest players, one of very few women, and she had decided to
forsake the too-high stage of the Empty Bottle and to set up on the
ground, eye-level with all of us fortunate witnesses.
The lyrical, inward-directed focus and quiet intensity of that trio
set was only obliquely, distantly predictive of the forces Matana would
assemble with her ongoing Coin Coin series, from Chapter One’s full-group explosions to the collaged voices, synths, and horns of the enveloping, resolutely DIY new Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee (Constellation).
When all hell was breaking loose in Ferguson this past August and I
found myself on the other side of the globe, Matana was one of the few
artists whom I relied upon for day-by-day, moment-by-moment accountings
and recountings. I thought of BOMB as an ideal venue for her to amplify
the conversation.
— David Grubbs
Merging a creative practice as a musician with social consciousness,
Matana Roberts offers an almost anthropological examination of music,
storytelling, and the long, diverse trajectories of African Diasporic
people. Her music in the world emanates a peaceful rebellion against the
power and apathy that seek to undermine if not destroy that Diaspora.
Revolutionary tendencies expressed in Roberts’s art reveal the
continuity of aesthetic resistance that has been an essential component
of Black American cultural production for as long as there has been an
America. Roberts’s work also derives its stance from the universal
provenance of artists, the flexible exercise of expression within the
medium of choice, in this case sound.
Though Roberts is often classified as a jazz musician, she prefers
independence from categories. She has referred to herself as a “sound
adventurer.” For months she has been living on a houseboat in the water
off the shores of south Brooklyn, finding much inspiration from harbor
sounds, water fowl, and the clamor of weather. This perhaps temporary
style of living provides an analogue for her musical approach, for the
constant coordination between chaos and collectivity that inspires
improvisation as a philosophical attitude and spiritual practice.
Christopher Stackhouse Let’s talk about your new album first. Tell me about the record, or the three records, the Coin Coin series.
Matana Roberts I began working on the Coin Coin series
in 2005. I’ve been trying to place and explore some information on my
own ancestry, alongside time periods in American history that I’m
fascinated with. One is the history of slavery; the other, the nature of
political and financial growth through different historical periods in
America. I come from a family that spends a lot of time talking about
history and context. As an artist, musician, and composer, I am
interested in experimenting with alternative modes of composition and
different ways of ritual and spectacle. I wanted to challenge myself in
exploring the tradition of improvisation in American music. The project
basically represents all the things I felt I couldn’t do in the other
musics I was exploring, or in the other collaborative work I was doing. I
have a particular fascination with history as narrative and how
narrative constantly gets cut up and changed and completely taken out of
context, or put in context and taken out again. There’s this sort of
cyclical, rhythmic thing that seems to happen through history.
My work has twelve segments—two solo and ten ensemble segments, each
of which presents a different configuration of instruments and sound
textures. The solo segments deal with my interest in one-woman
technology, using saxophone as my base and experimenting with
alternative modes of notation using graphics and video. And each record
is a document of the score and the ideas, but none is the finished
product of any of the work. There are so many musicians in and outside
of New York City who I want to work with. I’m trying to create a
language with many different artists. That’s always been a base of the
whole series.
CS How does chronological narrative
manifest itself when you’re not speaking, when only music and sound are
available? Do you think pure sound can articulate and embody an
ancestral, historic experience and bring it to the present? I don’t mean
just in your performances but in music, generally speaking.
MR I’m not certain that pure sound can
reflect that but I am certain that abstraction can. I find history so
nonsensical in many ways. To me history is not linear; it’s on this
constant, cyclical repeat. And that is one of the things that fascinates
me about working with sound and the traditions that I’m trying to deal
with. The project is set up as going in a linear direction, but it’s
not. If it was, the solo record you just heard would have had to come
first, Chapter Onenext, and then Chapter Two. The
pureness of emotion that can come through sound is clearly what is
guiding the listener and myself as a performer. Sound can mimic emotion
in such a way that it can cross so many lines of difference and
struggles; it can weave things together in what I call “a womb of
experience.” I’m trying to create a live rendering of the work, or
better, a live workshopping of the work. It is just never complete.
Bringing everyone—the musicians, the artists participating, and the
witness participants—together in this sort of one-time womb of
experience and finding that sound—for me that relates back to pureness.
The emotion that sits with the pureness of those sounds really draws
people to the core of what I’m trying to do.
CS The city of Chicago is influential
to your music, to your personality; it informs your ethos. You were
raised in a racially segregated city, and, even more interestingly, a
city that was founded as a commercial depot by a black, probably Haitian
man, Jean Baptiste DuSable. Chicago has produced an enormous amount of
music and art with a deep sense of Afrocentrism. The city is a nest for
Afrocentric culture, a town with tons of political engagement around
labor, and a center of revolutionary thought. It’s the place where Fred
Hampton came into political maturity and was murdered. It’s the place
where house music found its way and where the blues found a home. How
has that city informed you spiritually and intellectually? How does
Chicago stay with you?
MR My Chicago experience was very
multifaceted and mixed. A lot of my family came to Chicago in the ‘30s
and ’40s. Both of my parents were born there, but my father is a scholar
and we moved to places like Ithaca, New York, and Durham, North
Carolina, before returning to Chicago when I was a teen. I have a great
amount of pride as a Chicago artist coming out of the particular
political climate I was born into. My name is Matana because my parents
were Hebrew Israelites for a short time in the beginning of that
movement in Chicago. Matana is the Hebrew word for gift, and my
siblings got Hebrew names too, except my brother, who got an Arabic
name because my parents then cycled into the Nation of Islam for half a
second. I love the stories from that period. Then, for another minute,
my parents were organizing with Black Panthers in the area. They were
very young. My mother was eighteen when she had me. I just got to watch
them move through these important African American political narratives
in Chicago. My grandparents and great-grandparents were also into
supporting grassroots community work and voting rights. Being
first-generation Southerners in the Midwest, there’s a certain swagger, a
certain energy that African American folks in Chicago just have. I took
a trip last year going through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee,
and I finally understood the signifiers and codes that I experienced
growing up but which never fit with the Midwestern terrain.
I was first exposed to experimental music from my parents’ record
collection. I started playing music when I was eight years old thanks to
free lessons I got in the public schools in the various places we
lived. I was able to bring that back to Chicago and just really dig in
at a performing arts high school. There, I got more serious about music
and art and started studying the history, and noticing things around me.
I decided I was going to be an orchestral clarinet player. At
seventeen, eighteen, I had a hard time volunteering to study a history
in which I didn’t see anyone that looked like me. I was having all sorts
of identity crises about Beethoven, beautiful composers, beautiful
music, even though my grandmother used to say that Beethoven was a
secret Black man, or a dark Spaniard. But that still wasn’t good enough.
The women I would hear about were Hildegard of Bingen or Clara
Schumann. I felt like I couldn’t connect, so I started digging into more
improvised art forms, thanks in part to running into young white
musicians who seemed to be reveling in a certain era of historical
blackness.
CS Were your parents involved in the arts?
MR My father grew up poor on the West
Side of Chicago and my mother grew up working class on the South Side of
Chicago. Most of the people my father went to school with ended up in
prison or dead before they even got out of school. My father was told
not to go to college, but to get a job at the Campbell’s soup factory,
which was pretty big in Chicago at the time. But there was a teacher who
corralled some of the young men in the school and got them interested
in reading, and chess, and music. That, combined with the rising
politics at the time, created the household I grew up in: we paid
attention to the political landscape, and, from my mother’s family, were
very clear about African American working-class pride. These were my
environments while I was trying to develop musically. Eventually, I
started going to clubs with improvised music sessions and met all sorts
of people, like Nicole Mitchell or the great Fred Anderson, who had a
club on the South Side called the Velvet Lounge. There I ran into Riot
Grrrl, George Lewis, and members of the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians. It’s where I first met Joshua Abrams and Chad
Taylor, people I ended up collaborating with. At the same time, I
started dabbling in the Chicago blues scene, I would go to jazz and
avant-garde sessions and I had friends at Thrill Jockey Records, one of
the first independent rock labels. I met punk Canadians, and got
involved with that. There are so many people from across genres who have
helped me get an understanding of what music can be. They all had a
very original approach to what they were doing and I have always felt
that I have a responsibility to do the same.
CS You were able to build up a
remarkably diverse musical background for yourself. What you share about
being born to working-class parents who are invested in education and
self-empowerment is a common story. I know many contemporary black
artists, writers, musicians, and academics from “up South” and the
Midwest who have similar foundations.
MR At one time in Chicago there were
more African American folks than in the entire state of Mississippi. The
city became this radar for culture and many things got their first try
there before fanning out to other places. I feel very privileged to have
grown up around that. It’s like that silly moment here in New York when
it’s raining and you come out of the subway and there’s the guy on the
corner selling the six-dollar umbrellas he bought in Chinatown for one
dollar each. That’s an example of simple ingenuity. I saw a lot of that
growing up in Chicago, lots of black folks being very conscious of the
history that brought them there and figuring out ways to hustle in a
respectful fashion, bringing more opportunities their way. This informed
my practice very much.
CS That’s a very interesting point;
it’s crucial to the moment now where African American people are
experiencing the greatest disparity in wealth, access to educational
attainment, and home ownership. We’ve yet to see full participatory
activity and action in general society. Black folks are more on the
margins now, it seems, more than they have been in nearly a century. The
self-preservation impulse that you bring up, which is not wholly about
material gain, but about the maintenance of a cultural attitude by and
within the family, for survival—that historical sense of genuine kinship
in the struggle seems to be missing today. With your music and by
sharing and spreading your personal facilities, do you think you can
contribute to bringing that sense of unity and agency back to the
community?
MR Growing up in Chicago, I remember my
grandparents and relatives going out of their way to drive two hours to
purchase something from a black-owned business. As a kid I was like,
“Why are we doing this?” Or being in my grandparent’s neighborhood where
everyone had figured out a way to buy their plot and build their home.
There was a communal feeling where any adult could discipline me if I
was caught doing something bad. You don’t really see this anymore in
urban communities. I always had a particular interest in education, I’ve
worked with kids in pre-kindergarten all the way through college, and I
always thought of creating a school for inner-city children somewhere
deep in the boonies where I could teach them the ideas of community that
I was around when growing up. That is missing in poor communities
across racial lines. I’m not quite certain, yet, what my music can do
other than create awareness. Our present society has forgotten some
things—like the importance of compassion when dealing with difference.
We’ve got so much information coming at us, there is a kind of
numbness—which many artists now struggle with. I feel my music could
possibly cut through the numbness.
Matana Roberts, Untitled 1, 2014, mixed media collage on found urban objects, 12 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist
CS Would you consider your music to be part of the black radical tradition, as Amiri Baraka described it in his definition of the Black Arts Movement?
MR Yes and no. Again, the work that I’m making is a testament to the American radical experience that crosses so many lines, but I also understand why people feel I should be placed in the Black Arts Movement. My work wouldn’t have been possible without someone like Mr. Baraka and many of the artists who participated in that first wave. I want to be linked to them until my last day, but I also hope for people to see my work as it sits in a certain sense of American-ness, and not just as something for Black History Month. To see my work put in this construct where it’s not considered any other month or day of the year—it is something I struggle with. I don’t like the way African American artists get pushed into a corner where the multifaceted character and the complexity of their work goes unnoticed. To me, it puts us back on the auction block. I can’t exist in a way where I only feel connected to that early part of American history. It’s gotten to a point now that is mentally grueling for me
CS I find it impossible to think about America as a polity separate from the African American experience. I believe it’s culturally, politically, and socially what makes this country a cohesive place and, as far as I’m concerned, a radically modernist society. Our society is on the leading edge of something that is even beyond possible definition in the framework of so-called modernity—because of blackness or African Americanness. That is where the aesthetic portion comes in: Is there such a thing as pure sound, without cultural bias, completely objective, with no association outside itself?
MR Well, okay. I mean, sure in some ways. I spend most of my free time on small, one-woman rafts. I live on a boat right now on the local waterways. When I’m out there, I can experience sound in its pureness. Whereas with my work, the only pure sound relates back to the African American experience. To me, that pureness is a certain sound of historical pain. The rawness there goes beyond filters of culture and into filters of humanness. These are the contradictions for me. Looking through the lens of modernist aesthetics, to me, pushes aside the place of American history—I find that disrespectful. Modernity attempted to look past faith and religion and things of that nature. But the American experience, and the African American one in particular, is also built on this foundation of a religious history that is very troubling. The slave trade was completely based on religion—a white, male, patriarchical faith. I’m coming from an instinctual mode of operation based on my feeling of what it’s like to be black and female in America.
CS To ask what it means to have pure sound, I think is generative, but it is perhaps impossible to answer.
MR It’s an unfortunate thing, but the idea of pure puts on a colonialist filter for me. Merce Cunningham and John Cage, both of whom I admire, also dealt with this question in their works. The only way I can place it is by looking at my participation in nature, and pointing to why I like being in these natural environments more than I like being in the city, where I’m constantly reminded of these cultural filters that I have to have. When I’m out on the water, or just exploring the environment, I can still experience being drawn back to something ancient and, I hate to use this word, almost tribal. I don’t know what it is or where it comes from. As soon as I get off the water and the boat and go back to the city as a New Yorker, I’m reminded of its constant codes.
CS It’s very positive to hear you question notions of purity this way, because they play into various kinds of social hierarchies that diminish the individuality of human beings. You named it right away. One of the reasons I asked you that was because of how problematic concepts of purity are. I thought about pure sound the other day as I was walking down the street and heard this bird screeching, Yaa yaa yaa! It was a blue jay and its voice cut right through all manner of urban noise generated by man—trucks, hydraulic hissing, and so on. I thought to myself, Is that pure sound? Is that the essence?
Your vocalizations, when you’re not using words, those are pure sounds coming out of the instrument of your body. That is the unique, kind of pure sound I’m thinking of.
MR It’s fascinating what you’re saying. My records are text heavy and I wish that they were not. I need text and narrative, so I can place my experimental sounds for people who may not be as versed in dealing with them. The texts are really important for drawing people in. But the non-textual sounds go back to this pureness that is so great about improvised music. There’s a certain kind of communication that happens through the horn that I can share in many different languages in one instant, and without the use of text and words. But then I’m really fascinated with spoken language. I bounce back and forth between the two.
The purity of sound for me goes back to the Chicago traditions and to the musicians and artists I so admired. My favorite Chicago saxophonists, I know within a millisecond, because there’s this individual purity that they are able to plug into which is different from this Westernized idea of purity that I’ve been taught. It’s about freedom from contamination, or adulteration of otherness.
Matana Roberts, Untitled 2, 2014, mixed media collage on found urban objects, 12 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
CS Tell me about “panoramic sound quilting.” Was it developed as a philosophical approach or was it specifically tailored for your project?
MR Sometimes I regret that I created that term when I first started the project in 2005. I needed words to root myself, when I wanted a sense of centering. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about playing live improvised music were the different sound panoramas that I could create. Dealing with history, there was so much data to manage that I needed a way to remind myself that what I’m doing is turning data into sound. I consider myself more of a crafts person than an artist with this work. There are a lot of different American traditions that I’ve always admired—and quilting was one of them. On my Mississippi side, my great-grandfather was a sharecropper and traveling preacher, and he used to quilt together with my great-grandmother. I would love to learn how to quilt using fabric but, then, I wanted to figure out a way to do that using sound and images of graphic notation as my fabric. As rebellious as I am by nature, I like having a system. Each physical score in the Coin Coin series is following this particular system I’ve set up. Once the scores stood as their own objects, away from the music, I wanted to bring in different musicians who had played other chapters before. They would still be comfortable with the wildness of the notation, because they actually knew the underlying system. So I’ve been trying to weave all these things together under that terminology. Also, visually, the notion of panoramic quilting excites me.
CS It’s like a metaphor for action. Here is one of my more pedestrian questions: it’s rare to see and hear women in progressive jazz, or improvisatory, compositional music. Do you have peers, mentors, or idols who are women?
MR Yeah. They’re have been many. One of the reasons I moved to New York City was because I thought there were more women playing music here. Within experimental music I’d have to point out Amina Claudine Myers and Nicole Mitchell. Nicole has mentored me in different ways over the years. Ms. Myers is someone I’ve always admired, noting that she’s also from Chicago. Being around the rise of women in rock and punk rock also did a lot for me, as did African American females in hip-hop music. That’s a whole other aesthetic that I plugged into but not completely. I’m not a jazz musician, I understand why I get put there, but I can’t identify all the other parts of myself within that genre. I’m doing so many things with sculpting sound and I’ve always looked in other art forms for research, purpose, and for centering myself. New York City is full of some of the most amazing women of my generation who are playing jazz; you don’t hear about them because the music industry in set up that way. Luckily, the rise of the Internet has changed that a bit.
CS It’s poignant to say that you are not a jazz musician.
MR The reason I say that is not because of disrespect for the tradition, but because of my respect for tradition. I am a hybrid of so many different American sound traditions. People want to call this mixed record a jazz record. It’s fine with me if that makes them listen to more fringe music.
CS Over email, we corresponded a lot about Ferguson, and how police brutality is out of hand in our country, how the legal system habitually fails African Americans. Allowing McCulloch to put together the Grand Jury and set up this indictment of Darren Wilson was cynical. A self-proclaimed white supremacist Neo-Nazi ended up on the jury. But everyone wants to pretend these things aren’t happening. Is activism part of your creative life?
MR A couple of summers ago I was stopped and almost frisked on the Williamsburg Bridge by a white police officer. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, even Sean Bell, all this collective annihilation of black male bodies just continuing—it plunged me back into how I grew up, watching my own father being stopped by the police, hearing my young male cousins, having these conversations with their mothers, all snowballing into a setup-ness. I see my work now intertwined with that, as the tool to weave through that setup-ness and to use the resources that have been given to me through music to bring more awareness to these very troubling issues. I have a responsibility to speak and possibly to be even more cutting than I have been. I cannot separate my creative purpose from what is happening—I’ve seen a lifetime of this demonization of black maleness.
We could have a whole conversation about the privileges of African American women versus African American men in this country and the chasm that has been created. It’s a chasm that people are unaware of unless they’re in the belly of the beast. You see these millennials leading the protests and it’s a front row line of young African American POC women. This is a different black feminist aesthetic from the one I grew up around, with the support of my mother, my grandmothers, and aunts. There’s something new developing with all of this; my work is a cane to get me through the blindness of the time period that we’re in right now. I don’t know what is going to happen but one thing I love about history in the making is that it has shown time and time again that there is resolution. It won’t be a permanent resolution, because this country still hasn’t fully acknowledged that it is built on denial. I sense that this is not going to change soon; therefore it’s important for American artists to make work that reminds us of our responsibility for progression. The choices that I make as an artist have a lot to do with that. It’s the only way I know how to be right now. improvisation jazz composition (music) music theory saxophone African American culture
I'm a bit ashamed that it took me until this week to listen to Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (Constellation), the stunning new album by saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts, a Chicago native. Its 2011 predecessor, Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres—the
first in a projected 12-part series dealing with race and history over
the decades her family has lived in the U.S.—blew me away with its
stylistic range and dramatic sweep. She calls her process "panoramic
sound quilting," and her first installment, recorded with 15 musicians
from Montreal's underground music scene, registered as a towering
achievement.
As I wrote at the time:
"It's a digressive, free-associative patchwork, sliding from episode to
episode in a casual, almost conversational way, so that the story
elements feel more evocative than strictly narrative. Roberts draws on a
broad array of African-American traditions, from swing to blues to soul
to free jazz, and the vocals combine influences from work songs,
lullabies, spirituals, and (from the sound of it) primal scream
therapy."
The record veered freely from free jazz to noise rock,
which made sense considering that her collaborators were drawn largely
from the circle of musicians surrounding Godspeed You! Black Emperor and
Silver Mt. Zion. The new record was made in Brooklyn, where Roberts has
lived for more than a decade—she left Chicago in 1999—with a much
smaller cast drawn from that city's rich jazz community: pianist Shoko Nagai, trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Thomson Kneeland, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and the operatic tenor Jeremiah Abiah.
Unsurprisingly, the 18-section suite draws explicitly from the
composer's deep roots in the Chicago jazz scene, and while on the
surface she doesn't seem to be stitching together as many disparate
musical and textual fabrics as she did on the first recording, the way
each piece flows into the next without interruption is just as
impressive in its ambition and logical flow.
While Gens de Couleur Libres
focused heavily on the historical figure Marie Therese Metoyer, an
almost legendary freed slave and businesswoman who helped establish a
creole community in Louisiana around the turn of the 19th century
(according to Roberts's grandfather, he's distantly related to Metoyer
by marriage), the new installment is more personal. Texts sung-spoken by
Roberts and other group members weave together interviews with
Roberts's grandmother (the titular "Mississippi Moonchile") with
excerpts from a speech given by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer
at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, while Abiah overlays
formally strict opera singing. Some of the pieces are based on
traditional American folk tunes, but even the original material feels
familiar, with the saxophonist freely borrowing strains from across the
entire history of jazz—the first part of the album touches on bebop,
free jazz, swing, New Orleans polyphony, Mingus-style breakdowns,
elegant blues, and even gospel—with especially powerful contributions by
Palmer, whose full-bodied tone fits beautifully with Roberts's
pleading, tender alto. In a recent cover story published in the British
music magazine the Wire Roberts says, "I'm pretty sure what I'm
doing, somebody was doing in Chicago in '65. I'm OK with that. I'm
doing what I'm being told to do, by my own creative music. I'm just kind
of following." Yet while there's truth to what Roberts says, she is
also carving out her own aesthetic space, one that's startling in its
originality and gripping in its historic and social power.
Program will give awards to 100 artists over the next five years
New England Conservatory jazz alumna Matana Roberts ’03 M.M. is one of 20 individuals in the first class of Doris Duke Impact Awards, presented by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Roberts will receive an unrestricted cash grant of as much as $80,000.
The
Impact Awards were announced April 22, alongside the third class of
Doris Duke Artist Awards since the program’s 2012 launch. NEC alumnus Don Byron ’84 was among the initial group of Artist Award recipients.
Over the next five
years the Doris Duke Foundation will fund the work of 100 “artists who
have influenced and are helping to move forward the fields of dance,
jazz and/or theatre,” through the Impact Awards, according to a
statement from the Foundation. Past Doris Duke Artist Award recipients
submit nominees for Impact Awards, and these nominations are reviewed by
a separate, anonymous panel of artists who then select recipients from
this pool.
(Matana Roberts performing at Ran Blake’s 70th birthday celebration in NEC’s
Jordan Hall, April 2005. Photo by Andrew Hurlbut/NEC)
Born in Chicago, alto saxophonist/composer Matana Roberts has been based in New York City since completing her master’s degree at NEC.
She works in many performance/sound mediums including improvisation,
dance, poetry, and theater, and aims to expose the mystical roots and
the intuitive spirit raising traditions of American creative expression
in her music. Her current long-arc project, a 12-part music cycle called Coin Coin,
incorporates “Americana research, ancestral memory, imaginative
storytelling, instrumental improvisation and vocal performance, which
includes opera alternating with screams of joy,” and has resulted in two
recordings to date. She is a past member of the BRC: Black Rock Coalition and the AACM: Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
NEC’s Jazz Studies Department was
the first fully accredited jazz studies program at a music
conservatory. The brainchild of Gunther Schuller, who moved quickly to
incorporate jazz into the curriculum when he became President of the
Conservatory in 1967, the Jazz Studies faculty has included six
MacArthur “genius” grant recipients (three currently teaching) and four
NEA Jazz Masters, and alumni that reads like a who’s who of jazz. Now in
its 44th year, the program has spawned numerous Grammy winning
composers and performers. As Mike West writes in JazzTimes:
“NEC’s jazz studies department is among the most acclaimed and
successful in the world; so says the roster of visionary artists that
have comprised both its faculty and alumni.” The program currently has 114 students; 67 undergraduate and 47 graduate students from 12 countries.
Composer, Performer
Born Chicago, IL, 1975
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
“... I was able to use the award to get off my usual auto pilot, and
really think about what I have accomplished so far, what the issues
have been with that, good and bad, and how I can better strategize,
build on its most positive aspects, and still thrive as a New York City
artist in the 21st century!... It really helped me, and I feel many
years from now it will still shine as the beacon it was when I received
it.”
--Matana Roberts, December 15, 2013
Matana Roberts is a sound experimentalist, musician, and alto
saxophonist who works in many performance and sound mediums including
improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. Her music aims to expose the
mystical roots and the intuitive spirit raising traditions of American
creative expression.
Selected works include Coin, Coin: Gens De Couleur Libre (CST Records, 2011), Live in London (CCI Records, 2010), and The Chicago Project (CCI Records, 2008). Selected performances of her work include Ritual and Rebellion (2008), a collaboration with Nicole Mitchell, Craig Taborn, and Chad Taylor at The Kitchen; Studio Sound (2010) at The Studio Museum of Harlem; the premiere of Epilogue (2012) at the Rhiz in Vienna; and the premiere of Exodus (2012) at Roulette, Brooklyn.
After
her FCA support, Roberts was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College,
Massachusetts (2013). Prior to her 2013 Grants to Artists, Roberts was a
Make-Jazz Fellow at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa
Monica (2011). Roberts also held residencies at and ISSUE Project Room
in New York (2009) and Roulette (2012). She received a B.A. from DePaul
University in 1997, and an M.A. from New England Conservatory of Music
in 2001.
I am an improviser, composer, variegated lineage-ed sound
conceptualist performer who uses the alto saxophone and its placement of
acceptance and contradiction within the American jazz tradition, as the
genesis point of entrance for the structure of my broad palette of
sound work and experiential artistic inquiry. I am committed to creative
work that is deeply experiential in nature, yet broadly performative,
inquisitive, improvisatory, yet unapologetically contradictory, and raw
in scope and rendering. I am dedicated to work that dares speak of
memory, challenges social norms, critically investigating all
possibility, and as a derivative, internalizing a new understanding of
the worlds I see and the worlds I wish to see better.
Matana Roberts, saxophone
JD Allen, tenor saxophone
Vijay Iyer, piano
Liberty Ellman, guitar
Thomas Morgan, bass
Damion Reid, drums
Last year the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based, AACM-veteran saxophonist Matana Roberts
released to much acclaim THE CHICAGO PROJECT, a recording of dynamic
compositions that paid homage to her southside windy city roots. This
year she is working on a a set of soundscapes to be recorded that pays
homage to her big apple wanderings. Interpreted by a band of
one-of-a-kind NYC sound warriors, ILLUMINATION is a collection of
soundpaintings that testify to why any artist would chose to live in New
York in the first place. Acity unlike any other, with an artistic
spirit unlike any other: an Illumination in sound, space, real time; a
testament to the tenacity of the creative human spirit.
Matana Roberts:
Saxophonist/Improviser/Composer/21st Century Sound Conceptualist Griot
Brooklyn based sound artist Matana (mah-tah-nah) Roberts, is a
dynamic saxophonist, composer and improviser, who tries to expose in her
music the mystical roots and spiritual traditions of American creative
expression.
As a Chicago native she was fortunate enough to be surrounded by
musicians who showed her by distinct example the importance of listening
to one’s personal creative voice while at the same time using the
profound and many layered traditions of jazz and improvised musics to
act only as her creative guide, not as her creative definer. By using
their mentorship, she has been able to craft a voice and creative focus
that truly speaks to her own true artistic individuality. She feels
strongly that her music should not only reflect the many colors and
moods of universal human emotions, but that it should also testify,
critique, document, and respond to the many socio-economic, historical,
and cultural inequalities that exist not only in this country, but all
over the world.
Matana, a nominee and recipient of national commissions, residencies
and awards, has appeared as a collaborator on recordings and
performances in the U.S., Europe, and Canada.She is an avid freelancer
on a wide array of artistic projects, and has played alongside some of
the most intriguing creative sound visionaries spanning across genres of
this time period. www.matanaroberts.com
“Stand Creatively in Defiance:” Matana Roberts ’03 M.M. Returns for Residency
Matana Roberts ’03 M.M. coaches, conducts, & performs during October residency
Faculty and students from NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation (CI) and Jazz departments were delighted to welcome Matana Roberts ’03 M.M. for an October residency.
Roberts worked with students individually and with a
32-piece orchestra comprised of Jazz, classical, and CI students, to
prepare for an October 18th Residency Concert of improvised music, with Roberts conducting and playing alto saxophone and clarinet.
What was it like to work with Roberts in rehearsal and performance? Melissa Weikart ’18 M.M. Contemporary Improvisation shared her experience:
We started off exploring textures as a group, then one of the most interesting parts for me was that she used words of self-affirmation as a framework for improvisation.
I had never experienced that, but it was an example of how she ties her identity and the way that she interacts with the world into the structures of her music. I was really excited to see this at play, and it gave me ideas for my own improvisation in the future.
Matana Roberts rehearses with students, including Melissa Weikart at the piano.
I’m a songwriter and pianist and singer, and I’m really interested in gender studies—I’m the co-president of Students Advocating for Gender Equality here at NEC—so that’s something that I try to investigate with my own music.
The fact that she was up there in a position of power was
inspiring to me, and in terms of her music, she really emphasized
self-love and self-care, which is just not a way I’ve interacted with
free improvisation before. That really resonated with me, and I think a
lot of others, too. It’s so often that as musicians, we’re
beating ourselves up over our music. To take a moment to engage with
self-love and self-affirmation through our music was new.
It was interesting for me that she’s also a classically
trained musician, and I was a classically trained pianist. It’s been
kind of nerve-wracking getting involved with improvisation over the
years, and she was a role model in the sense that we made the same shift from classical to improvised music.
I’ve made that shift at NEC, and I’ve especially been making it this year, this semester. It’s
been really exciting and empowering for me because I had this mental
block, and then this year I decided, “Hey, I’m going to try new things,”
because that’s kind of what CI should be. We should have an open mind
because there are so many opportunities. So I felt like: “Okay. I’m
going to embody that.”
I felt really seen and supported by her as an instrumentalist. It felt really great to play piano in the concert.
Through my life's work, I stand creatively in defiance.
Matana Roberts’03 M.M. Jazz Performance Studies
THE
MUSIC OF MATANA ROBERTS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH MATANA ROBERTS
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Matana Roberts, Untitled 1, 2014, mixed media collage on found urban objects, 12 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist 
