Matana Roberts is an internationally celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Working across many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, music composition, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre, Roberts is perhaps best known for their acclaimed Coin Coin project.
The ongoing twelve-part Coin Coin series began with Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres (2011), which was named “one of the most conceptually ambitious, sonically captivating, emotionally raw musical odysseys of the decade..” by Tiny Mixtapes, whilst The Wire deemed Matana “a major talent”. The album’s story begins the Coin Coin cycle in 1742, the birth year of freed slave entrepreneur Marie Thérèse Metoyer, whose nickname, “Coin Coin” (also a nickname given to Matana by their grandfather) gives us the title of what NPR called “consistently rewarding music”.
Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile is woven together from verbatim conversations Matana had with their grandmother. It features the talents of tenor Jeremiah Abiah, pianist Shoko Nagai, trumpeter Jason Palmer, double bassist Thomson Kneeland, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara. In the wake of its release, Pitchfork deemed Matana “one of the most exciting new spirits in contemporary music,” and LA Times called Matana, “a unique, shape-shifting compositional voice”.
In recent times they have served as distinguished guest composer at the University Of Chicago, chair of the Music Sound department at Bard MFA, music & sound fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme.
