By the time the 46 minutes of COIN COIN Chapter Three: river run thee end in a wash of synthesizer, one verdict resounds long beyond the haze: It is no longer adequate to call the New York saxophonist Matana Roberts a mere musician. Roberts’ initial reputation indeed stemmed from her reed-based backstory; an improviser in Chicago who co-founded the bracing trio Sticks and Stones, she eventually broadened her work through scrappy solo records and session musician work with the likes of TV on the Radio and Burnt Sugar.
Her proper step toward the spotlight, though, arrived with the release of her last two albums, or the first parts of a planned 12-record series dubbed COIN COIN. Intended as her personal and political exploration of African-American history, the work would pivot between the country’s barbaric slave-trade roots, the sustained suffering of Reconstruction, the upheaval of the Civil Rights era, and the country’s current climate of racial turmoil. She’d broach all of these topics, sometimes within the same song. The idea seemed an audacious undertaking, an epic that would either put Roberts in rarified visionary company or find her struggling near anonymity as she worked toward COIN COIN’s conclusion sometime around the start of this century’s second-third—or maybe both.
The work began brilliantly, with Roberts leading jazz ensembles large and small through tempestuous, non-linear tales of hard truths. Slaves were bought and abused, sold and insulted; mothers rescued children; a great diaspora scattered kin across corners of a new country. Roberts served as both anchor and motor. Using a technique she calls "panoramic sound quilting," she pushed both bands through intriguing hymns and choruses, tangents and outbursts, reading and screaming and singing as the music moved around her. But could she continue plundering the past with a sound that kowtowed to it for a full dozen records? Could the "jazz musician" take it that far?
It seems now that she never intended to. river run thee, the third installment, is a seamless solo improvisation for a panoply of electronics, a multitude of multi-tracked voices, and a small coterie of saxophones. Something of a one-woman opera, these 12 tracks plow through harsh noise passages and spring into sudden refrains, drift through halcyon field recordings and float through harrowing spoken-word passages.
As a whole, the album examines the ways in which seemingly innocent objects—the oceans and the boats that traveled them centuries ago—fostered so much suffering that continues even now. (It is worth noting that, for the past several months, Roberts has lived on a houseboat in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, writing about her experiences as if to reclaim that vestige of American infamy.) "Oh, why do we try so hard? All is written in the cards. The price rolls by the seaside," Roberts sings in the intoxicating and traumatizing opener, her cracking alto seeking redemption in spite of itself. The music reflects that maritime perspective: Oscillating tones and static swells are severe enough to induce seasickness. Roberts’ kinetic saxophone—and, sometimes, her voice, too—must wade through an electronic din, as though the sounds were a secret signal sent underwater.
The process here is paramount. Working in the same Montreal studio she utilized for mixing the first two COIN COIN albums, Roberts kept adding layers to the same batch of tapes, responding in real-time to what she’d already recorded rather than using a computer to put tiny parts into a meticulous whole. She inserted fragments of American standards—the famous and infamous "Star Spangled Banner", the soporific lullaby "All the Pretty Horses"—and field recordings captured on a trek early last year through several benighted and/or proud burgs of the South. That semi-live approach elevates river run thee past the point of collage; there’s a momentum here that recalls, for me, the gusto of a great Aaron Dilloway set and a situational attentiveness that mirrors the close care of Pauline Oliveros. A solo noise-and-vocal record about history and built with folkloric and found texts might seem like an invitation to the obscure. But in part because of how it was made, these 46 minutes are magnetic, inescapable. I find myself wanting to see like Roberts sees, to hear like she hears.
To that end, river run thee suggests that Roberts is her generation’s rejoinder to Laurie Anderson, another wide-screen thinker who combined her instrument, voice and tale with the sounds and stories of others to ask questions so large that easy answers might not be found. But where Anderson could feel cool and clinical, Roberts takes care to be urgent and intimate. Though this set is a solo construction, where only she speaks and sings and vamps with her saxophone and synthesizers, it is absolutely not an interior map or a diary given sudden voice. Roberts instead pulls across generations and geographies, so that the confessions of a slave-trader neighbor the convictions of Malcolm X and the sound of a lonely saxophone telling the news of the blues tangles with the screech of a subway car and a newborn baby crying. It’s hard not to think of Roberts driving through the South, collecting and observing the experiences of others. In crossing theirs with her own, her work becomes an overwhelming chorus instead of an isolated monologue. This suffering is not meant to exist in a vacuum.
Late into river run thee, during one of the album’s more placid moments, Roberts declares, "I like to tell stories." The admission might suggest an easy key to the world that Roberts is building with COIN COIN. But it seems too reductive, really, not unlike calling her a mere musician. She collects stories, analyzes them, and then transmogrifies them, aggregating bits of material until anecdotes become open-ended, elliptical histories. Roberts knows that any story, just like jazz, is only an initial approach to something much more broad and important. Three albums into COIN COIN, it’s now clear that Roberts isn’t just a storyteller, musician, ethnographer, historian, bandleader, arranger, improviser, or activist. She plays all of those roles, yes; collectively, they power one of the most provocative ongoing bodies of work by any American musician.
