Time has no steady rhythm, despite what a clock insists. Matana Roberts, who might agree, saw how the tempo of history seemed to move irregularly through both her own memory and the national one: how choice points seemed to speed up, wane, cut, coda, and hold; how nostalgia coddled, unsettled, blurred, and muzzled moments. “The past: It sits there,” she said in a 2016 interview, pausing to savor a delicious silence, “but it moves.”
Roberts is one of those artists permanently disturbed by the wing of a single, broad muse—here the muse being America, boiled in its own blood, disquiet, mettle, and hate. Her self-appointed task across a projected 12-part album suite of what can unsatisfyingly be bucketed as free-jazz (but in reality is more like historical fiction accompanied by a loud bouquet of horns, ouds, and vibraphones) is akin to what essayist Elizabeth Hardwick selects as her lodestar on the first page of her best, wooziest, and final work, Sleepless Nights. “This is what I have decided to do with my life,” she writes. “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life.” Like Hardwick, Roberts has a firm sense of purpose and a fabulist’s impulse, beginning with a vision of the past—on this album, memories of a young woman whose parents were killed by the Klan, a story loaned to her by her Memphis-born grandmother—and using it as kindling to cannon a hailstorm of paean and shrapnel.
History, as it often does, crashes in with savagery. Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis is like the other three extant Coin Coins inasmuch as it’s marked by a tumbling of psychic and cosmic ephemera, allowing free improv, folk spirituals, and guttural yawps from throat and sax to mimic the beatitude of a woman’s disguises, passions, and dignity against the thrashings of circumstance. This effort, however, feels firmer, and more fulgid. In this sharper focus, Roberts’ subtractions have an additive effect: Whereas Coin Coin Chapters One, Two, and Three approach women as platforms by which to explode outward into sound, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis focuses more tightly on myth-making by channeling the protagonist in a broadly narrative form. We learn of her father, of her grandmother, of her prayers for safety, and watch Roberts narrate as a vessel for her spiritspeak.
Both the pieces that utilize her voice—which is most satisfying in a tranced-out, babble-as-hymnal mode—and those that are voiceless somehow summon the sensation that she and her band have swallowed their instruments so as to transcend them. Roberts’ saxophone in the prologue, “Jewels of the Sky: Inscription”—which capitalizes on the horn’s capacity to blare like what one imagines the sun might sound like if it were played (low, eruptive, juicy)—is divine noodling, astral magma. The epilogue, “How Bright They Shine,” ends on deep, reedy emissions like dispatches from a satellite stuck in time and orbit.
Space feels grounded in Roberts’ work, though. Mirages of Chicago’s free-jazz heroes—of which Roberts is now resolutely one—mist through inescapably, but so does the city of Memphis. To call upon Memphis as a signifier of place and time is a choice that irresistibly forces images of its past to projectile into the present: the stuff of Sun and Stax, the Southern rag, Three 6 Mafia, Johnny Cash, the blues. This isn’t to say that she sounds directly reminiscent of them, but instead assumes herself as part of a cultural lineage devoted to confronting the darkness, the grimness, the apocrypha of the South. She summons the same dramatic tensions that surface when staring at a Confederate statue still erect in 2019.
At the substrate, Roberts’ work is that of a woman in thrall to the legacies of family and history, but so sensitive to the sharp pains and violent rearrangements of a national consciousness that she needs to experience them instrumentally, which is to say, through her body. In a recent interview with The Quietus, Roberts devotes a large part of her conversation to a fascination with the idea of moving through water as experienced by indigineous and African-American bodies during the transatlantic slave trade. “The way in which free divers use their lungs is something I’m very curious about as a saxophonist,” she says of deep-sea diving without an oxygen tank, a new hobby. “I do a lot of the breathwork that I learned in my saxophone practice now.” That phrase—breathwork—sums the brio and intensity of Roberts’ vision. It should come as no surprise that respiration and inspiration come from the same Latin root, spir: ‘‘to breathe.” The force of Roberts’ breath—first through the saxophone, all endurance and fits and starts; then through time, inflated and vivified—makes bold how much the retelling of history is a necessary game of survival—an ongoing, fluid act of resuscitating the dead.
Toward the end of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick closes in on her own memory-remaking with a lapidary line that may as well have come from a chorus in the middle of Memphis: “The weak have the purest sense of history.” It takes no effort to imagine Roberts chanting it in one of her fugue states, reaching crescendo as she stacks the words like a highway pile-up: The weak have the purest sense of history; the weak havethepurestsense of history, theweakhavethepurestsenseofhistory… Roberts’ history-making is impure in a literal, fundamental way—that is, part patchwork, part arch composure, part sacrament—but it’s all extremely real. What she does here, and what she will continue to do, is allow her body’s blood to beat loudly enough so that it matches the irregular rhythms of the past. She inhales and exhales life into memory so as to make it new—or, maybe more accurately, she affords history the brief freedom to breathe.
Buy: Rough Trade
