Now into its second decade, theĀ Coin Coin project by the mixed-media artist Matana Roberts continues to explore African-American history through a recuperative focus on memory and ancestry, summoning a heteroglossia of voices through group recitations, guttural catharsis and plainspoken word, graphic and other aleatoric forms of notation, samples, loops and effects pedals plus the torrents and cascades of their own alto saxophone.
Describing their practice as a process of ‘panoramic sound quilting’ which weaves together fragments of spirituals and other folk songs while naming the series after the freed slave and pioneering Louisiana businesswoman Marie ThĆ©rĆØse Coincoin, the project to date has veered from ensemble jazz and big-band live performances to solo noise collages buttressed by manipulated field recordings and swarming drones.
On this fifth instalment Roberts turns to the timely issue of reproductive rights, telling the story of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion. Steadily unspooling the ‘old dusty saga’ through spoken word passages and free jazz squalls, solo saxophone reflections and the martial airs of Mississippi fife and drum blues, the artist is joined for Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden… by the violinist Mazz Swift, their fellow alto saxophonist Darius Jones, the clarinetists Matt Lavelle and Stuart Bogie, the percussionists Mike Pride and Ryan Sawyer, the smoky pianist Cory Smythe and the Alicuanta vocalist Gitanjali Jain. That’s an outstanding cast while Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio produced the album and also contributed on synthesizer.
From the opening figure in ‘ebony brown, bucket brown eyes a wandering’ and the abiding affirmation ‘the women in my line whispered truth’, the narrator ofĀ In the Garden…Ā – who describes herself in passionate, downcast and bitterly ironic terms as ‘electric, alive, spirited, fire and free’ – tells of her two ‘love bit boys’, an adulterous partner and the machinations of his family, who view her variously as an outcast and a jezebel, her own fulfilment denied and her accomplishments ‘forever under review’.
Finding herself again with child yet failing to sate the suspicions of her partner, she surveys ‘possible futures’ and winds up throwing herself down a long flight of library stairs as dreams combust, sparkling eyes waver and voices splinter and sworl before being carried off on the gallop of equine feet. Then a wind chime commences its rattle, and spirituals become hauntologies, lullabies or requiems for the dead even as the act of remembrance opens up hidden pathways and portals, one woman’s voice unlike wagging tongues with the power to shape and reshape our futures present.
