Matana Roberts

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Matana Roberts performing at the Vortex Jazz Club , London (2009)
Matana Roberts Moers Festival 2010

Matana Roberts (* around 1978 in Chicago ) is an American jazz musician ( alto saxophone , clarinet , vocals ), songwriter and composer of the Modern Creative .

Live and act

Roberts grew up on Chicago's South Side and learned to play the clarinet as a teenager. As a child, her father introduced her to the music of Sun Ras and Albert Aylers . She became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Her mentors included Von Freeman and Fred Anderson , in whose club she made her first appearances with her trio Sticks and Stones , which she founded with bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor and with whom she released a first album in 2002.

In 2002 she moved to New York and worked in Montréal in the mid-2000s in various experimental projects and groups, such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor ( Yanqui UXO ) and A Silver Mt. Zion ( Kollaps Tradixionales ) with. They also worked with Oliver Lake , Julius Hemphill , Myra Melford , Jayne Cortez , Steve Lacy , Eugene Chadbourne , Henry Grimes , Nicole Mitchell , Robert Barry , Joe Maneri , Miya Masaoka and Ralph Alessi and dance projects of Merce Cunningham and Savion Glover , with which she worked on a tribute for John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy . In 2007 she made a guest appearance at the London Jazz Festival with her band consisting of Josh Abrams (bass), Jeff Parker (guitar) and Frank Rosaly (drums). In 2008 her album The Chicago Project was created . On the album produced by Vijay Iyer , she played with members of the post rock bands Prefuse 73 and Tortoise as well as with Fred Anderson.

With her own multimedia project COIN COIN, she combined concepts of art, music and theater into a representation of Afro-American history , for which she researched the lives of seven generations of her family:

“ Coin Coin is a musical tribute to the legendary Marie Thérèze Coincoin. She lived in the south of Louisiana and was able to free herself from her slave existence in the 19th century. For each chapter of Coin Coin , Matana Roberts has written its own music, which is interpreted by different bands. In the first chapter, entitled Gens de Couleur Libre , Matana Roberts examines the female lineage of her ancestors and the music in French-speaking Louisiana. "

12 albums are planned within the COIN-COIN project, four of which have been released so far ( Gens de Couleur Libres 2011, Mississippi Moonchile 2013, River Run Thee 2015, Memphis 2019). In 2016 she released three solo recordings on Bandcamp under the title For Standing Rock , with which she showed solidarity with the protests against the construction of an oil pipeline under the Standing Rock reservation .

Rolling Stone magazine chose Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens De Couleurs Libre 2013 in its list The 100 Best Jazz Albums at number 48.

In 2008 the Jazz Journalists Association nominated her for the Up and Coming Musician of the Year Award . In early 2010 she worked as a curator at The Stone club in New York .

She has been married to drummer Seb Rochford since 2016 .

Discographic notes

  • Sticks and Stones (481 music, 2002)
  • Shed Grace ( Thrill Jockey , 2003)
  • The Calling (Utech, 2004)
  • Lines for Lacy (s / r, 2006)
  • The Chicago Project (Central Control International, 2008)
  • COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres ( Constellation , 2011)
  • Live in London (Central Control International, 2011)
  • COIN COIN Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (Constellation, 2013)
  • Matana Roberts / Sam Shalabi / Nicolas Caloia : Feldspar (Tour De Bras, 2014)
  • COIN COIN Chapter Three: River Run Thee (Constellation, 2015)
  • always. (Relative Pitch, 2015)
  • COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis (Constellation, 2019)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Portrait at Sandy Brown Jazz
  2. ^ Biographical portrait on BBC
  3. ↑ a b Information at sugarindex.com
  4. ^ Information from Thrill Jockey
  5. ↑ Information at the ATP Festival
  6. ↑ Information at studiomuseum.org
  7. ↑ Information on Coin Coin at taktlos.com ( Memento of the original from May 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.taktlos.com
  8. ^ Matana Roberts: Deep Listening on the FreeJazzBlog.org, accessed February 6, 2015.
  9. ↑ For Standing Rock on Bandcamp, accessed August 13, 2017.
  10. ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  11. ↑ Information at All About Jazz
  12. ↑ Verity Sharp with Seb Rochford and Matana Roberts , BBC, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Roberts, Matana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH around 1978
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago