Prismatic Park: Matana Roberts

Chicago-born, NYC-based alto saxophonist Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer and bandleader whose work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. A past member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Black Rock Coalition(BRC), she prefers the term "sound experimentalist" to the historically charged "jazz musician" to refer to her multidisciplinary work, which also encompasses theater, poetry, dance, and most recently visual art. Since 2006 Roberts has developed a visionary 12-chapter project called Coin Coin, inspired by the nickname of freed slave and businesswoman Marie Thérèse Metoyer, who established a well prospering Creole community in Louisiana. Drawing from the intertwining narratives of her own genealogical research and fragments of African-American history—from the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement to the current climate of racial turmoil—Roberts offers a nearly anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse trajectories of the African diaspora in America. Her compositional approach, which she calls "P.S.Q.: Panoramic Sound Quilting", employs collage-based paper and digital graphic scores as a basis for new music composition, improvisation and her bricolage of work songs, lullabies, spirituals, poetry, electronics, and primal screams. She has collaborated with Roscoe Mitchell, Jayne Cortez, Merce Cunningham, Jem Cohen,Rob Mazurek, Henry Grimes, Vijay Iyer, Nicole Mitchell and Pauline Oliveros to name but a few, and has been invited to lecture and teach extensively.