Jazz breaking news: Matana Roberts Coins new chapter of her reflective project

Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres (reviewed in the June 2011 edition of Jazzwise) presented an evocative reflection on slavery, with Roberts and 15 other Montréal-assembled musicians playing an original combination of avant-garde and more traditional sounding music.

The project’s second installment continues the series’ conceptual theme, dubbed ‘American liberation music of the 21st century’, and is guided by the aesthetic practice Roberts calls “panoramic sound quilting,” a reference, in part, to her family’s handicraft heritage. Exploring both personal ancestry and collective history, Chapter Two examines the narratives and emotions found within – struggle, celebration, suffering, empowerment, liberty – which are evoked and explored through the group’s music.

The album also revisits the past with regards to the music itself: a mix of historical and contemporary sound, intertwining genres, timbres and emotion. Mississippi Moonchile returns to the roots of jazz, while remaining hugely experimental, incorporating traditional music and free improvisation (which itself plays a role in the history of Chicago-born Roberts’ home city) as well as elements of rock, operatic voice and interwoven lines of ‘wordspeak’, pronounced by Matana herself. Fittingly, amidst the album’s esoteric soundscape contents Roberts repeats: “There are some things I just can’t tell you about…”

Whereas the first chapter was delivered by a large ensemble, the second is the work of a New York sextet, who recorded the album in late 2012 following several live performances. It is one of five chapters to already have been heard on stage, forming part of the 12 chapters that will ultimately make up the complete Coin Coin project. Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile will be released on the 30 September by Constellation Records.

– Celeste Cantor-Stephens

Click here to listen to samples of album tracks ‘amma Jerusalem school’ and ‘for this is’.