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Matana Roberts

Matana Roberts, a musician, main instrument: alto saxophone; works in many performance/sound mediums including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. She aims to expose the mystical roots and the intuitive spirit raising traditions of American creative expression in her music. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures. Past member of the BRC: Black Rock Coalition and the AACM: Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Holds two degrees in music performance. Based in New York City.

Matana Roberts, a musician, main instrument: alto saxophone; works in many performance/sound mediums including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. She aims to expose the mystical roots and the intuitive spirit raising traditions of American creative expression in her music. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures. Past member of the BRC: Black Rock Coalition and the AACM: Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Holds two degrees in music performance. Based in New York City.

Sound – Space – Sense (Book)
People perceive audio events in very different ways. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the physics, biology, signifiers, and unconscious processes on the basis of which auditory experiences are constructed. The book applies the methods of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice, and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels—a topology of resonances, reflections, and vibrations in perp…
Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden
* Double 10" in 350 gsm widespine jacket w/interior colour flood + 300 gsm printed inners + fold-out insert + DL card * Celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, soloist, band leader, educator, activist, and mixed-media artist Matana Roberts returns with a new installment of their acclaimed Coin Coin series. For over a decade, Coin Coin has been the central artistic project for Roberts, a remarkable exploration of American ancestry and the nature of memory through "sound quilting": modern com…
The Truth
Pat Thomas is one of the most extraordinary pianists of our time. In a first time duo with saxophonist Matana Roberts, the lyricism of his distinctly dexterous and curious approach to the piano paints pathways for Robert’s poignantly vocal saxophone. Together the two speak; locked grooves and neat switchbacks on the keys form dialogue with long deliberate lines on the alto, punctuated by Roberts’ ecstatic vocalisations.  The trio of improvised pieces which make up the record’s first side are ric…
Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series — a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for its fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern / avant composition — Roberts calls it “panoramic sound quilting”—and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts’ archival and oft…
Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee
"River Run Thee" is the third installment in Matana Roberts’ visionary Coin Coin series. The album follows 2011’s "Gens de couleur libres" and 2013’s "Mississippi Moonchile", both genre-exploding ensemble works showered with widespread critical acclaim.With Chapter Three Roberts presents a solo work, building a hallucinatory and hypnotic soundworld from layered streams of sung and spoken vocals, pure and processed saxophone, drones, noise, sampler/fx pedals and field recordings. Coinciding with …
Coin coin chapter two: Mississippi Moonchile
Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes, fragmentary …
Coin coin chapter one: Gens de couleur libres
At first look this might seem like a weird move for the Constellation label as Matana Roberts’ debut for the imprint is pretty much straight-up free jazz. But she’s got some serious history with the Montreal collective, even throwing down horns with Godspeed  Thinking about it too, there’s always been a nod towards the free jazz scene (not least on Colin Stetson's recent genre-bending LP) but where others were a nod, ˜COIN COIN Chapter One : Gens de Couleur Libre…
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