Matana Roberts - COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis

A Closer Listen

COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis is essential listening.  It screams the past to the present, echoing Spike Lee’s cry at the end of Do the Right Thing:  “Wake up!”  We still haven’t woken up.  We still haven’t faced the sins of our ancestors, or tried to make reparations.  Instead, we’ve compounded our sins.

Racism is a global problem, but the United States has patented a particular brand, an umbrella that includes choke holds, unprovoked shootings, institutionalized poverty, gerrymandering, refugee limits and chants of “Send them back.”  One might say we’ve perfected the art of racism, creating a template for others to follow; and follow they have.

Roberts uses every communication tool at her disposal. She sings, screams, quotes and loops.  She folds in jazz, drone and sacred song.  She doesn’t preach as much as she presents.  In love with the positive aspects of the African-American experience, Roberts highlights the community, the faith, the endurance ~ all while underlining the sorrow, the fear, the rage.  Her saxophone and clarinet burst with the freedom of free jazz, offering transcendence through vibrant creation.  The band is all-new, ranging from Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush) to guitarist Hannah Marcus.  Jaw harp, fiddle, accordion and more engage in frantic interplay, rushing their notes into existence before they are extinguished like whitewashed history.

Liddie is an ancestor of Matana Roberts, her father killed by the Klan, her mother “disappeared.”  I’ve never been so frightened before, since mama told me to hide, those voices of those loud men getting ever more ferocious it seemed.  And sometime later mama dashed in and told me to run …  I am a child of the wind, even daddy used to say so, we would race and I would always win.  And he’d say run baby run, run like the wind, memory is a most unusual thing.  

That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?  Since then, we’ve had the civil rights movement and elected a black President.  These are old problems.

Two years ago in Charlotte, violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Commenting on the violence, the United States president was quick to point out that there were “very fine people on both sides.”  In 2014, a New York city police officer held Eric Garner in a chokehold.  The incident was caught on camera.  Garner cried, “I can’t breathe” ~ the last words he ever spoke.  This summer ~ five years later ~ his assailant was not charged with any crime.

Where is the church in all this?  Roberts’ spiritual background is a running theme in her work: a reminder of the ways in which shared song reflects and reinforces identity, and the ways in which spiritual song connects to the original Biblical figures, sidestepping any human reinterpretation.  The album’s first words are reminiscences of attending a childhood worship service, sitting in the back but not understanding why.  The tone seems joyful, like a forced smile.  Over the course of the album, the words accumulate in a tsunami of sadness.  The house of God, they said, was not for the mixing of the races. Some of those voices I could make out: Mr. Hancock of the dry goods store, Mr. Hart of the livery stable, and even Daddy’s cousin Thompson McCall.

Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do you remember me? 

August, 2019.  Memphis.  A local diocese dismisses charges of racism against a priest who refuses to hire a housekeeper on the grounds that his dog “doesn’t like black people.”  August 2019.  Memphis.  Accusations of racism ~ and the backdraft to such accusations ~ roil the mayoral race.  “Day-doh,” sings Roberts, ironically echoing “Day-O,” a song the current Canadian Prime Minister once sang in blackface.  Fun fact:  there are more American governors who have worn blackface than there are American governors of color.

Roberts’ maternal grandmother stares directly from the cover, defiant.  What strength of will it must take to be a mere spark in the midst of a deluge.  And yet this spark is passed on, through family story and musical heritage, through blood, through grace, on to the current day. “I speak memory,” writes Roberts.  “I stand on the backs of many people, from so many different walks of life and difference, that never had a chance to express themselves as expressively as I have been given the privilege. In these sonic renderings, I celebrate the me, I celebrate the we, in all that it is now, and all that is yet to come or will be.”

And we’ll roll the old chariot along, and we’ll roll the old chariot along.

Richard Allen

The Quietus

Matana Roberts’ twelve-album Coin Coin series is a mammoth undertaking, combining written scores, improvisation, storytelling and performative theatre, that has already produced three works of stunning originality. Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres, was recorded with a fifteen-piece backing band. Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile, reduced the numbers to five, but added operatic tenor vocals in the form of Jeremiah Abiah. Chapter Three: River Run Thee, was the most collage-like, a solo venture that most accurately expressed Roberts’ own definition of ‘panoramic sound quilting’ and added additional emphasis on her unmistakable narrative voice.

For Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts is backed by a new band, featuring Land Of Kush and Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sam Shalabi on guitar and oud. Fiddle, accordion, trombone, vibraphone, clarinet, double bass, jaw harp and bells also appear in the mix, added to Roberts’ wonderful alto sax and distinctive vocal. It’s another essential instalment in a series of albums that sound like little else, outside of themselves.

Roberts’ has described Memphis as “twenty-first century liberation music,” and it’s easy to see why. Opening track, ‘Jewels Of The Sky: Inscription’, acts as a kind of banishing ritual with its vibrational, aum-like vocal, percussion pattering like rain and a lyrical swell of saxophone. Banishing rituals are used in magick to create safe spaces for sometimes dangerous workings. Ritual magick (the art of causing change to occur in conformity with will) and performance art are both primarily concerned with the expression of operator intent in a non-standard setting. Both use forms of invocation or evocation. Or as William Burroughs saw it, magick is a form of “behavioural cut-up”.

Having established that space outside of everyday reality, the music shifts considerably. ‘As Far As The Eye Can See’ is a controlled cacophony of honking trumpet and trombone, fast drum rolls dying down to the twanging of a jaw harp with Roberts’ vocal beginning a refrain that runs throughout the album like a connecting thread: “I am a child of the wind, even daddy said so.” Roberts’ narrative has a fractured form that both requires and rewards the listener’s active engagement. Certain phrases repeat and develop over time but not necessarily in a linear fashion, though the themes themselves are almost inescapably obvious. “Going to church, we always had to sit in the back, dressed in our very best, it seemed wrong...” Roberts intones, her spoken word taking on a sung quality in parts.

‘Trail Of The Smiling Sphinx’ is the longest piece here, at almost ten minutes. Like the majority of the music, it’s far from an easy listen. A jarring vocal of intoned sounds rises amongst a stuttering drumbeat. A guitar sound with an African quality washes up against a strain of Appalachian-flavoured fiddle. The music is swirling and uncertain, as if tectonic plates of sound were colliding, creating new and unstable registers. Roberts’ narrative mirrors this process: “Life goes on like the mighty water on its way to the gulf, sometimes calm, sometimes dashing, waves high”. Describing a moment of longed for justice, in a fantasy that betrays the unpalatable nature of the actuality underlying it, Roberts relates: “her eyes would light up and lips curl, when she told me of the heaven where black folks could enter any of the twelve pearly gates. And they walked on streets of gold and they all had shoes”.

Several instrumental pieces follow. ‘Shoes Of Gold’ offers a welcome shift in the sound palette with the introduction of vibraphone. ‘Wild Fire Bare’ settles into a relatively smooth groove after a tumultuous start, and as such is a standout track musically speaking. ‘Fit To Be Tied’ mutates into a kind of woozy big band, with a New Orleans feel. ‘Her Mighty Waters Run’ is another high point, with deeply affecting, multi-tracked vocals singing: “Life goes on for as long as it lasts. We’ll roll the old chariot along, and we’ll all hang on behind.” ‘All Things Beautiful’ returns to the narrative voice, describing a different kind of ritual, one where “they were all wearing those strange hoods over their heads again”. ‘Raise Yourself Up’ matches the strength of the title’s sentiment with the album’s most propulsive piece of music yet, and the intoned message: “You are proud of who you are”. Finally, ‘How Bright They Shine’, returns to an atmosphere similar to the opening track, closing the loop and encapsulating the experimental evocation of the recording.

This is another incredible addition to Roberts’ Coin Coin project, and one can only assume that when the 12-album cycle is completed, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of twenty-first century sonic and narrative art.

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