It took her more than a decade, but saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts has arrived at a full expression of her aesthetic. In the late 90s, when she still lived in Chicago, she impressed small local audiences at the Velvet Lounge and the Empty Bottle, playing mostly in Sticks & Stones, a trio with bassist Joshua Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor that mixed post-Ornette Coleman grace with 60s free-jazz turbulence. Since then her horn playing has grown even stronger and more fearless—the 2011 quartet record Live in London, on Barry Adamson’s Central Control label, demonstrates just how much more—and her musical vision has evolved into something deep, multifaceted, and powerful. Recorded proof of the latter arrives May 10 in the form of Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres, her debut release for Constellation—best known as home to the crew of adventurous rock musicians in the orbit of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion. The first installment of a projected 12-part opus, it’s a quantum leap for Roberts, its ambition and complexity unprecedented in her discography.
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Roberts left town in 1999 to attend graduate school at a conservatory in Boston—she prefers not to name it, in part because of the “disgusting” cost of her education—but she’d already learned a lot from some of Chicago’s most respected saxophonists. “I really feel like I took Fred Anderson’s history in music course on Sundays,” she says, “and audited Von Freeman’s seminar on Tuesday nights.” She moved to New York upon finishing school, and she’s been working on Coin Coin since early 2006, after receiving a $5,000 grant from prestigious NYC performance space Roulette to create and perform a new piece. That same year she also won a $10,000 Van Lier fellowship, awarded to provide “support for talented, culturally diverse young people who are seriously dedicated to a career in the arts.”
“I had this really awful decoupage period,” she explains. “I was painting my [instrument] cases and doing all of these collages, and I didn’t understand yet that what I was trying to do with that was what I wanted to do with my music—I just hadn’t figured out a way to do it. I was talking to my maternal grandmother, who lives on the west side, and she was telling me about how her mother and father used to quilt—they were sharecroppers. She explained this system to me, taking all of these different pieces of worn-out clothing to create this whole other thing, which was kind of a living, breathing representation of the past. That’s what I wanted to try to do with these scores and pieces.”
Most of the eight pieces on Gens de Couleur Libres use their freely improvised passages and patchwork structures to create a kind of rambling, intuitive feel—when an arrangement repeats a section, in the manner of a chorus or a verse, that’s the exception, not the rule. Though Roberts uses chunks of Western notation in each score, most of her writing is in graphic notation, which gives the musicians a great deal of freedom to shape how the pieces move and develop. The arrangements juggle shifting melodic parts, countermelodies, and propulsive riffs among several clusters of instruments—brass, strings, and even the vocal-like harmonizing duo of singer Gitanjali Jain and musical-saw virtuoso Lisa Gamble.
