Matana Roberts on the Origin of Coin Coin

Chicago-born, NYC-based saxophonist Matana Roberts is three chapters into her 12-part Coin Coin series of albums, released via Montréal’s Constellation Records. Based on parts of African-American history she wanted to explore, the composer and experimentalist saw Coin Coin – named after a freed slave and businesswoman – as an opportunity to challenge herself.

The records are a deeply personal project inspired by her own experiences with spirits and an important document that both pays homage to and openly questions the American jazz tradition. In this excerpt from her lecture at the 2016 Red Bull Music Academy, Roberts discusses the stories and ideas that are feeding the Coin Coin project.

The Coin Coin series is my attempt to bridge a few things. I have a particular interest in the spirit world and contacting the spirit world, and it’s something I’ve dabbled in since I was a small child. Then I stopped dabbling in it for a while, because usually when you do those sorts of things you need a guide. If you don’t have a guide it can lead to states of psychosis and things of that nature. It became apparent to me that music was actually supposed to be my guide if I wanted to dabble in those things.

I also have an interest in American history. American history is so just complex and complicated, and there were so many different areas of that history that I’ve always wanted to look at.

There’s also my own ancestry. I have records of my own ancestry going back now to about 1750, and I just felt like I wanted to share that somehow and [figure out] how could I push it together.

Coin Coin is a nickname of a very famous former slave woman that I’m related to by marriage. It’s possible that I’m in there by blood, but I don’t know for certain. She became a very powerful landowner in a part of Louisiana called Natchitoches. She created this whole area where free people of color could live and exist, and have a really incredible standard of life in America during a time period where you wouldn’t expect that to be happening. She was the first strong female archetype I’d been exposed to as a child, my grandfather used to call me Coin Coin and I learned about her before I learned about Harriet Tubman and all these people.

I just decided that I wanted to do something to honor what her story did for me. Her story gave me a lot of courage to be who it is I’m supposed to be.

The way ancestral history had come down to me was mostly through the women, and I thought that was really fascinating. At the time that I had started this project, I read a book by an indigenous American woman – I think she was Navajo – and she had done research on her family five generations. She was trying to understand the linkages between trauma that existed in each generation. For instance, in each generation of her family, there was the trauma of alcoholism. How that just went from generation to generation, but how no one ever really talked about it. I found that really fascinating.

I feel like my sense of humor, for instance... There was somebody on a plantation somewhere being funny, and that’s why I can be funny. Because there is this through line that happens, and so I really wanted to place women’s voices at a very particular way. Not forget about the men, but to have some sort of route for myself in terms of how I feel about a “woman’s place in the world” and how I feel about how people connect or not connect, and how people share stories.

[Coin Coin] was ten [parts originally], and the whole framework has been planned out since 2005. The problem is I didn’t realize it was going to take me as long as it’s taking. I started 2005 and I was like, “By 2011 I’m going to have a concert of all the segments.” That was it. I said, “That’s what I’m going to do and it’ll be like my Ring Cycle or something and that’ll be it.” Each segment I get really in the world of the segment and then I notice new things that I can try and do.

Watch the full conversation with Matana Roberts below.