New York-based sax player Matana Roberts is set to follow up her acclaimed 2011 album, COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres, with another collection of thoughtful and nuanced jazz experiments. Her upcoming record, COIN COIN Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (due out October 1st via Constellation Records), finds the artist paring back the jazz sprawl of her previous release for a more lean, direct approach. Where Chapter One was comprised of over a dozen musicians from the Montreal jazz scene, Chapter Two was written expressly for a sextet to perform. Recorded in late 2012, this album is the end result of years of touring with the same group of people, practiced until these songs churn with a life of their own. Combining piano (Shoko Nagai), trumpet (Jason Palmer), double bass (Thomson Kneeland), drums (Tomas Fujiwara) and operatic tenor voice (Jeremiah Abiah), Roberts has gathered together a group of incredibly talented musicians to realize her carefully composed vision.
For our first taste of her upcoming record, she has released a teaser of two new songs called “amma jerusalem school” and “for this is.” Playing as two seamlessly interconnected pieces of music and not bound by anything as remotely provincial as track delineations, Roberts has applied this idea of interwoven rhythms and sounds to the entire album, backing away a bit from the insular textures on her previous record. Even as just a “teaser trailer” of sorts for the album, these two tracks display a natural progression and a casual spontaneity that allows Roberts and her musical cohorts a chance to bask in the simmering emotions and disparate narratives common to expressive jazz experiments. Check out “amma jerusalem school” and “for this is” below.
