MATANA ROBERTS

Matana Roberts is a renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist and sound experimentalist, operating internationally on various contexts and artistic fields including improvisation, dance, poetry and theatre. Born in Chicago but based in New York for a few years now, she considers herself first and foremost a self-taught mixed media composer, one that always looked out to learn more through out her life by taking on free arts programs on the american public school system. She’s been nominated and made a recipient of many awards of artistic merit, as well as being attributed grants for creative research, associated with the jazz and the contemporary & new music worlds, along with many invitations to teach, partake in lectures and debates, conduct workshops and take on multiple types of artistic residences on various locations under different typologies and conditions. The third chapter of Coin Coin was released on Constellation Records on February of 2015, as she has an agreement with the canadian label to publish the 12 long-players she planned since the first volume back in 2011. She is perhaps best known for this critically acclaimed project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures.