The saxophonist Matana Roberts had to start big. She had a story to tell, after all, and it was an important one, a saga that she said would take a dozen albums, lined together in her Coin Coin series. More or less, the odyssey is that of her extended family’s ascent in North America, from Transatlantic servitude through the Jim Crow South and onto her present role as one of the most exciting new spirits in contemporary music. And so Coin Coin’s first episode, the 2011 album Gens De Couleur Libres, featured 15 other musicians, collected from Montreal bands such as Land of Kush and A Silver Mt. Zion and assembled in the Hotel2Tango, where Roberts recorded live in front of an audience. The audacious set pitted shrieking, incensed post-bop against moody, mournful atmospherics, plaintive balladry against electrified indignation. This aggressive hodgepodge of styles—“panoramic sound quilting,” Roberts calls it—suited her cause: to revisit her ancestor’s days as slaves in the South, being sold on the auction block and forced to find a new faith, and then to press on. The material was stormy and angry, beautiful and forlorn, a wide beginning for an admittedly lengthy trip.
Mississippi Moonchile, the second installment of Roberts’ Coin Coin series, is consistently smaller. This time, for instance, the ensemble backing Roberts is only a quintet, culled from the improvisational ranks of New York and Boston. It’s a relatively traditional group, too, with her alto saxophone often dovetailing or countering the trumpet of Jason Palmer. Bassist Thomson Kneeland and drummer Tomas Fujiwara make for an adaptable rhythm section, capable of effortless undulation and knotty zigs. Pianist Shoko Nagai possesses similar versatility, her careful, cloudy chords sometimes giving over to spastic, assailant lines. (There’s an opera singer, Jeremiah Abiah, here, too, but more on that in a bit.)
And if Gens De Couleur Libres was an envelope of eternity, with no clear beginning except for time itself, Mississippi Moonchile focuses on the life of Roberts’ grandmother, a poor Southern girl who grew up in an era of keen turbulence that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and America’s crawl toward civil rights. Roberts interviewed her grandmother about growing up in that time and place. She speak-sings excerpts of the testimony off-and-on throughout these pieces, integrating the memories with Bible verses, recognizable colloquialisms, and civil rights dialogue. The net effect suggests James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in which the young, black author used a mix of history and fiction to trace the relatives he knew back to the Southern slaves he did not. Baldwin had the written word for his mission; Roberts, a fitting emissary, has a century of jazz.
Neither the size and standardization of this ensemble nor the focus of Roberts’ timeline make Mississippi Moonchile less audacious than its predecessor. Instead, this set runs uninterrupted for 49 minutes through 18 tracks, a compositional feat made more impressive by the way the suite moves so fluidly between the segmented past of its jazz predecessors. Roberts is a meticulous and comprehensive composer, but this music ricochets with the intensity of free jazz and dives smoothly into Sunday afternoon sessions. Mississippi Moonchile boasts impeccable melodies and excoriating variations, cantering rhythms, and debilitating breakdowns. Here, it’s possible to trace the influence of Count Basie and Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Mahalia Jackson, all on the same reverent level. On “Woman Red Racked”, she twists an antediluvian Southern blues into a surreal call-and-answer; for the closer, “Benediction”, she turns the familiar words and tune of a praise song into a soul-settling balm after a gauntlet of assailant horns and unsteady drums. That continuum approach—blurring ancient history into the rather recent past, and pulling both at once into the present—fits Roberts’ widescreen vision of history and of herself. That is the core of the Coin Coin effort: This work is neither about Roberts nor her family. It’s about anyone who’s ever tried to understand how they arrived in their own peculiar position.
That, of course, is no easy proof, which is where Jeremiah Abiah, the operatic tenor, comes in. His bellow is deep but dynamic, stretching upward in crescents and dipping low to add textural density to this album’s otherwise acoustic sound. Interview transcripts and pinball approach notwithstanding, he is the esoteric addition—and, arguably the most important one. After listening to Mississippi Moonchile a few times, try to imagine the same material without him: no distended vibrato passages during “Confessor Haste”, no expressive paroxysms during the brief “All Nations”, no ruptured moans during the valley of “Lesson”. The music seems too clean and too clear that way, as though this aggregate of American anecdotal and musical history is now a complete lesson, a lecture meant simply to be studied and redelivered later on an exam.
But Roberts knows better than that. Remember, this is her family, and even she quotes her grandmother time and again saying, “There are some things I just can’t tell you about, honey.” Indeed, for all the seismic variety here, that admission of the unknowable serves as this record’s leitmotif—we can hear about the hardships (the need for rain and the dearth of education) and the small joys (the fruits and the arrival of plumbing), but we can never really know them entirely. Abiah imparts an intentional opacity, then, a means to push this part of the story to an obfuscated end. Roberts doesn’t want us getting too comfortable with this history, as though we’ve dealt with its perils. “You can use these stories and narratives as a way to express a past but also a present,” she told The Wire earlier this year, speaking about the subversive ways slavery still exists. “And, what’s really interesting, what I hope to parlay the work into more, is using it as a platform [to address] these other forms of slavery that are continuing on.” That is, we’ve got our own problems to worry about now. With Coin Coin, Roberts—a history buff with a bold vision for the moment—has 10 more volumes to approach them.
