While alto saxophonist is the usual label placed on Roberts, she made it clear with the first chapter of this series that she had conceptual ambition in no small measure. A multi-faceted work that drew together slave narratives and family history by way of music and spoken word, Coin Coin Chapter One stood in the grand tradition of the oratorios or ‘audio-drama’ developed by anybody from Cannonball Adderley to Julius Hemphill, and this second installment arguably betters it in terms of the narrative construction and quality of the scores. First and foremost, there is a greater tightness in the sequencing of the 18 scenes, or perhaps paragraphs, within the chapter, and the range of moods is wide. Roberts’ soloing and the intricacy of arrangements that constantly alter the configuration of the ensemble are excellent, but her real masterstroke is the placing of gospel at the musical fulcrum of the work. It is like a beating heart that pumps out an energy that resonates powerfully with both the explicit operatic and avant-garde elements that are threaded in. These genres are not readily mentioned in the same breath, but given the coherence with which they are networked here it makes you wonder whether Muhal Richard Abrams’ collaboration with Ella Jackson shouldn’t be considered in the same light as a Kathleen Battle cantata. If Chicago-born Roberts owes a debt, conscious or unconscious, to the above then her observance of the guiding principles of her ville natale’s pioneering musical institutions, AACM and AEC, is writ large on this work, and the prevalence of hypnotic vocal chants that make use of every member of the band to create both call and response and a sense of dramatic punctuation is a key feature of this resoundingly original statement.