MATANA ROBERTS - always.

In a landscape where hype has inevitably spread even into the jazz field, shifting its coordinates toward an audience that is less and less its "own" and specialized, the unanimous recognition given to rising star Matana Roberts remains fully justified and, dare I say, beyond dispute. And this is certainly not by virtue of some always-desirable innovation in the language of Black music: on the contrary, Matana's artistic calling is that of historical memory, tasked with passing down the word of the gens de couleur even before that of jazz, a world from which she essentially declares herself an outsider.
This is also why it's hard to imagine any of her work not being in some way traceable back to the "Coin Coin" saga, launched in 2011 and now at its third chapter this year: a musical-ethnographic investigation of unparalleled intensity, in which recitation, traditional forms, big-band incursions and meditation merge into a narrative steeped in pain and racial pride.

Recorded live in studio in Brooklyn in May 2014, the session for "always." is a free song that rises in total solitude from Matana's saxophone. A poetic excursus through every current and legend of Black music: from the slow, sinuous spiritual-like incipit to bebop progressions, occasionally veering into free-jazz outbursts, the scant forty minutes of the two untitled sections form an unstoppable surge of feeling that fully demonstrates Matana's remarkable technical grounding and stamina – at times doubted by fellow musicians – without ever showing a single sign of flagging across its entire length.
Without any rhetorical excess, one can say that from this stream of historical and musical consciousness emerge all the ghosts of twentieth-century African-American imagination: the political militancy and theology of the great leaders of Black liberation, the deeply spiritual quest of Coltrane and Ayler, and the avant-garde drive of Coleman and Braxton; profiles that emerge one after another without pause, at times in the stillness of a melodic passage, at other times in a desperate cry, all filtered through Matana's eclectic sensibility.

The closing second track is the last outpouring of an unstoppable musical expression, the definitive testimony of a trinity that is grandmother, mother and daughter all at once, the keeper of a culture and a wisdom preserved over long years and now poured out in an explosive flood of words and notes, of which "always." is perhaps the most authentic and moving synthesis. A signature etched into history, forever.

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15/10/2015