The World is on Fire, but We Still Have Sounds
Matana Roberts, Mabe Fratti, Gina Birch, Mariam Rezeai, Thiago Nassif
The Present Resonates in the Past in the Latest Transmission from Matana Roberts
Last year I got to witness the live premiere of Memphis, the fourth chapter in Matana Roberts’ epic project of “panoramic sound quilting” called Coin Coin, at Jazzfest Berlin. The stellar recording of that effort was released back in 2019, so it took four years, fed by the pandemic’s isolation, for the music to reach the stage with the same crew of musicians, abetted by bassoonist Joy Guidry. Naturally, the performance reshaped the recorded iteration, which by then had been cemented into my memory, with improvisations casting different light on the written material, and the electric presence of the composer-reedist-vocalist guiding it through plenty of new byways. Roberts has devoted themself to realizing each of the 12 chapters they mapped out at the outset of the project back in 2006, giving themselves time and space to tell gripping, tragic slices of American history at its darkest, as well as its most resilient and resourceful. Each recording has deployed a different group of musicians, and that’s also the case with Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden, which was released by Constellation on September 29.
This new offering shares some loose qualities with its predecessor in terms of the dense, slowly unfolding arrangements. The endlessly shifting sounds behind Roberts’ oratory is richer and more sophisticated than anything she’s done while retaining the livewire vitality and edge that has carried through the whole project. But there’s no confusing the two albums, either, as the sonic heart of the new release revolves around the charged interactions of three additional reedists (Darius Jones, Stuart Bogie, and Matt Lavelle, who doubles on alto clarinet and pocket trumpet) complementing the composer’s own alto saxophone. The band also includes dual drummers Ryan Sawyer and Mike Pride, violinist Mazz Swift, pianist Corey Smythe, and the occasional synth interjections of Kyp Malone, who produced the record. Trumpeter jaimie branch was supposed to be part of the band, too, before her tragic passing prevented its realization.
As expected, the music has a different character than the broad stylistic sprawl of Memphis, which provided a kaleidoscopic reflection of that city’s musical legacy and wasn’t as concerned with strict fidelity as much as its energy and breadth. While a lot of the work hovers around free jazz, there are gorgeous patches of gospel-derived ecstacy and meditative West African trance. Roberts continues to touch on many traditions, veering between sacred and profane, but bringing it all together with greater flow than ever. While previous installments have deployed a more composite kind of storytelling, this time Roberts solely intones the story of her great grandmother, a lifeforce whom the composer describes as “electric, alive, spirited, fire, and free,” repeating the phrase throughout the whole chapter like a mantra that becomes impossible to doubt, and conveys strength and courage over time. The account is difficult, communicated from beyond the grave with a pointed persona that embraces contemporary language to underline how the narrative experience is sadly, horribly just as present now as it was a century ago, when it all happened.
Sharing her great grandmother’s experience comes in the light of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Roberts is fueled by a sense of rage, another layer of compounded suffering in a seemingly endless trudge toward incremental progress, only to be pushed right back. The narrator explains how the story has been passed down by female members of the family, an intimacy that adds greater resonance and depth of feeling. She recounts feeling trapped by a controlling husband who both ignored her and squashed her feminist essence, a damping complicated by motherhood, and when a cruel conflict with her husband—the father of her two sons—impels her to leave with the children, she finally appears to be free. Of course, in the US there’s rarely a reliable escape hatch for the poor or minorities, and she soon learns that she’s pregnant again. Summoning energy and mental positivity, she returns to her husband, seeing this as a blessing that could bring them back together, only to be shut out. Desperate, she is driven to take matters into her own hands, intentionally falling down a flight of stairs, inflicting violence upon herself that does end the pregnancy. Yet after further humiliations, she loses her own life, too. One of the most important goals for Roberts is to memorialize these obscured histories before they are either falsely rewritten or simply vanish. Another of the chants in this chapter promises, “My name is your name / our name is their name / we are named / we remember / they forget.”
The ensemble creates real heat together, translating the intensity of the narrative in sound. Roberts demonstrates a collective spirit in giving all of the horn players plenty of space. There’s some bold humility in placing the artistry of Jones, another alto saxophonist on a complementary artistic plane, alongside their own. There are plenty of substantial instrumental sections breaking up the narrative parts, with solo voices, small groupings, and the full ensemble moving deftly between each piece with nonchalant liquidity. With every passing year it becomes clearer that doubting the vision, fortitude, and creative potency of Roberts is stupid. Even without considering the formidable body of work they have amassed outside of Coin Coin, the first five chapters of the endeavor are so substantive, original, and resonant that it’s undeniable we are witnessing a different kind of history in the making. Below you can hear the instrumental track “shake my bones,” but isolating any single track reduces the monumental strength of In the Garden. Check it out, but I suggest starting at the beginning. Roberts is performing in Berlin for the first time since last year’s Jazzfest, presenting a solo concert on Sunday afternoon at KM28, at 3 PM.
Waking Up to the Transcendent Power of Mabe Fratti
Over the last week I’ve gone down a serious rabbit hole, basking in the striated beauty of music made by Guatemalan cellist and singer Mabe Fratti. I first heard her name a couple of years ago, and I gave some of her recordings a cursory listen, recognizing a lovely strain of ethereal, dreamy art-pop that reminded me a bit of Juana Molina’s most subdued work. She also plays on trumpeter Jacob Wick’s wonderfully strange 2022 album Standards (Full Spectrum), improvising on pop tunes with impressive invention and empathy, but when I first listened I was too focused on the leader’s disarming vocal style. Simply put, I wasn’t listening closely enough, as this current listening jag has revealed. Fratti, who lives in Mexico City, seems to disdain artistic hierarchies, and her music draws freely from pop, free improvisation, noise, and electronic music. She’s an inveterate collaborator, and her newest output radiates from an ever-expanding axis of musicians drawn from Central America, the US, and Europe, gaining strength, depth, and experimentation as time passes. She’s prominently featured in three different collaborative projects coming in the next few weeks where her presence is unmistakable.
I returned to Fratti’s 2022 album Se Ve Desde Aquí recently, and suddenly things began to rapidly click. Working closely with I. La Católica (aka Hector Tosta), Fratti forged a series of melancholy, richly textured pop songs marked by psychedelic production that constantly introduced new colors and timbres. On “Desde el Cielo,” which you can hear before, a recurring electronically-enhanced cello ostinato has more than enough strength to support the exploratory drumming of Gibran Andrade, the rasped cries and whinnies of saxophonist Jarret Gilgore, and wonderfully jarring interjections of tangled guitar noise and ethereal vocal harmonies. As the album unfolds a similar open-ended approach abrades and complements stunningly beautiful melodies. The music made me think of Brazilian drummer Mariá Portugal, and how she works with improvisers both in Brazil and in Germany to present the endlessly shape-shifting, abstracted pop songs featured on her brilliant album Erasão. I love freely improvised music, but there’s something thrilling about hearing the practice put into the service of pop songs, where unfixed arrangements can be reshaped, trashed, and rebuilt in real time. It’s a knockout from start to finish.
On November 3 London’s Scrawl imprint, known formerly as SA Recordings, will release A Time to Live, a Time to Die, the debut recording from a new Mexico City collective including Fratti called Amor Muere. The ensemble first came together four years ago for a multidisciplinary performance written by group member Camille Mandoki, and a bond was quickly established, leading to this slowly unfolding, ongoing partnership. The group also includes violinist Gibrana Cervantes, with Mandoki and Concepción Huerta—the latter made a terrific collaborative ep with Fratti in 2021 called Estática—adding synthesizers and electronics to transform string-rooted arrangements into something much larger and transportive. The five pieces are gorgeous and tuneful, suffused in shifting surfaces and atmospheres with rich, evolving details drifting through each piece. As the cycling grooves and ambient wash of “Can we provoke reciprocal reaction” fades out, it seems to dissolve into the opening of Love Dies,” a kind of somnambulant churn with swirling counterpoint, muted beats, and lush vocal chants. The album concludes with “Violeta y Malva,” a haunting 19-minute journey opened by field recordings of some industrial-like expanse, complemented by an enveloping synth pulse. The four musicians embroider this foundation with steady invention, constructing a gorgeous meditation built around Mandoki’s angelic voice (which, more than a little, recalls Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, flecked with Yma Sumac’s otherworldly ululations), teasing out new shapes and eddies from swooping lines and graceful curlicues. The piece allows us to glimpse how the quartet sculpts sound from the most minimal starting point. Below you can check out the album’s opening piece, “LA.”
On November 10 reedist Gilgore will release Shimmer, the debut from his new project Phét Phét Phét, on Unheard of Hope. The group’s core has plenty of overlap with Fratti’s work—she, Andrade, and Tosta are key members—and its atmospheric richness and melodic generosity suggest a mostly instrumental, tropical analog to Fratti’s work. I first heard Gilgore in 2015, when he was paying homage to the great alto saxophonist and long-time Cecil Taylor collaborator Jimmy Lyons, but here he’s embraced a much smoother approach, touching on post-rock, minimalism, and ambient music, all given a forceful push by Andrade’s percussion. As you can hear on “Se Siente Como,” below, there’s an almost architectural depth to the way different layers of sound are arranged, with Fratti’s breathy voice riding atop a glistening motoric groove enhanced by acidic guitar and needling analog synths. As with the Amor Muere record, this one also concludes with a long track, a 20-minute ambient improvisation featuring additional sound weaving from guitarist Marc Miller and pedal steel ace Susan Alcorn. While I don’t think these two forthcoming releases are as strong and dynamic as Fratti’s Se Ve Desde Aquí, they are definitely of a piece, and taken together they reinforce Fratti’s commitment to community, both in process and end result.
On Wednesday, October 11 Fratti will perform with Tosta at Morphine Raum. Nine days later the duo will release Vidrio, its first recording as Titanic, on Tin Angel—naturally, Gilgore and Andrade are also on hand here and there. I’ll admit that listening to all of these recordings—in addition to a bunch of Fratti’s earlier releases—in such a concentrated period may have flattened my perception of what distinguishes them from each other, but Titanic feels like the most overtly pop-oriented endeavor. Still, that doesn’t change the experimental and improvisational impulses at work beneath the surface. As you can hear on the opening track, “Anónima,” below, Fratti simultaneously interrupts and enhances the song’s lyric beauty with a muscular, thick, driving cello solo. While these new tunes are explicit in their hookiness, that doesn’t stop the musicians from digging deep, maintaining a devotion to spontaneity. I have no idea if Wednesday’s concert—which is billed as Mabe Fratti and I. La Católica—will touch on this material, but I’m now convinced that hardly matters. There’s obviously something innate in these musicians that will both connect to the sounds captured on this deluge of recordings while pushing toward something ineffably unexpected.
Quick Hits of the Week
Gina Birch
One of the things that attracted me to Berlin before I moved here was the overwhelming variety of live music on offer every single night, a state of affairs that’s on vivid display this week. In the course of preparing the Nowhere Street newsletter I learned about two different mini-festivals happening this week, both of which look quite promising. On Saturday and Sunday, October 14 and 15, Silent Green presents a mixture of performances, film screenings, and discussions under the name Female to Empower 2023, celebrating the legacy of experimental female artists who fought against deeply entrenched sexism in the music industry during the 1970s, particularly in the UK, where the Feminist Improvising Group and a slew of brilliant post-punk bands exerted themselves, altering history. There will be concerts by younger improvisers like Belgian electric bassist Farida Amadou and the Switzerland-based Argentine cellist Violeta Garcia, and Berlin’s Ale Hop and the trio Contagious (Andrea Neumann, Sabine Ercklentz, and Mieko Suzuki). There’s a screening of the documentary Stories of the She-Punks, co-made by Gina Birch of the Raincoats, that celebrates those UK-based post-punk bands like the Slits, Mo-dettes, Dolly Mixture, and Au Pairs (whose Lesley Woods will also perform during the weekend), as well as Ever Deadly, a film made by Chelsea McMullen and the singular Inuit coalist Tanya Tagaq that digs into the way the singer has navigated her native traditions with experimental aesthetics in a sexist world.
Birch, whose work with the Raincoats remains sui generis, taking punk ideology as a liberatory tool to create music of unparalleled intimacy, originality, and uniqueness, will also perform with her band on Saturday night. Earlier this year the 67-year old artist and musician dropped her first solo record I Play My Bass Loud (Third Man). The album isn’t as distinctive as the music she made with the Raincoats nor her short-lived group the Hangovers, but her indomitable spirit couldn’t be clearer, cutting through familiar forms, whether the dubbed-out reggae excursion of “Digging Down” or the electro-punk sneer of “Pussy Riot,” which celebrates the Russian dissidents, part of an album-wide embrace of feminist righteousness. On “Feminist Song” she sings, “When you ask me if I’m a feminist / I say, ‘Why the hell would I not be?’” while on “I Will Never Wear Stilettos,” she chortles amusingly at the notion of adhering to gendered fashion conventions. A number of guests turn up, including Thurston Moore, who lays down a skronky guitar solo on “Wish I Was You,” a brash and bright rock tune that sounds a bit like a stripped down “Cannonball” by the Breeders. Below you can hear “Dance Like a Demon,” an aching mid-tempo rocker that’s my favorite track on the album.
Mariam Rezai
The Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival also happens this weekend at Kunstquartier Bethanien, between Friday and Sunday, October 13-15. There are fifteen different performances from primarily female artists of Iranian heritage over the three nights, most of which seem to merge Persian traditions with electronic music. I’m absolutely generalizing here, as I haven’t had the time to check out most of the artists, but some names leapt out, including Sarah Davachi, who concludes the festival with a late set on Sunday night, and the British turntablist Mariam Rezeai, who performs on the opening night. Rezaei recently dropped a stunning new album called BOWN (Heat Crimes), that cements her position as one of the most bracing, experimental, and assured turntablists at work. The album is a visceral, noisy affair in which Rezaei embraces a confrontational almost explosive aesthetic that mutates, extends, compresses, and rips apart a vast array of terse samples such as the assemblage of overblown free jazz saxophones across “it COULD be jazz,” where her deft wheels-of-steel manipulations are pushed and pulled by the manic presence of drummer Bobby Glue (Guttersnipe), although it’s hard to tell whether he was accompanying her, or if Rezaei just transformed pre-recorded improvisations like putty. Check it out below. I’m still getting my head around the music, which is usually detail-packed, high-velocity, and breathless, except when it veers toward an uneasy contemplativeness here and there.
Nowhere Street Concerts: Thiago Nassif
The next Nowhere Street concert happens this Tuesday night at KM28, with the superb Brazilian polymath Thiago Nassif joined by percussionist Juca Junior. It’s been three years since Nassif dropped his excellent Mente (Gearbox), the latest in a series of bracing recordings that merge MPB, no wave, and pure experimentation with unabashed glee. The São Paulo native moved to Rio de Janeiro back in 2015, helping to transform the city’s music scene from a beacon of tradition and suave elegance into an experimental hotspot built around the venue Audio Rebel and the label QTV. Nassif has worked closely with producer, guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist Arto Lindsay, and he reflects that same sort of collision between tradition and modernity, frequently piercing delicate melodies with unholy spasms of noise and dissonance. Nassif promises to play music from Mente and its great 2018 predecessor Três, from which “Penasmentos,” below is taken, along with a heady dose of improvisation.
Speaking of the Nowhere Street brand, the October edition of Nowhere Street Radio will air live tomorrow at 4 PM in Berlin (88.4 FM) or online at Colaboradio, 10 AM EST. If you can’t tune into the show live, it will be archived at KM28’s mixcloud page. This month’s show features music from Bobby Austin, Moacir Santos, Cravo & Canela, Rodrigo Campos, Daniel Villareal, Modern Nature, Maria Elena Silva, Richard Dawson, Vilhelm Bromander, Anna Högberg Attack!, and Phil Julian.
Recommended Berlin Shows This Week
October 10: Thiago Nassif and Juca Junior, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
October 11: Phew, 8 PM, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
October 11: Mabe Fratti & I. la Católica, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
October 11: Margareth Kammerer & Rebecca Lane; Marta Forsberg, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
October 11: Sofia Borges, Nick Dunston & Joakim Rainer, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
October 13: The Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival, 8 PM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenpl. 2, 10997 Berlin
October 13: Jean-Luc Guionnet; André Vida, 6 PM, Café Plume, Warthestraße 60, 12051 Berlin
October 13: Big Joanie, 8 PM, Badehaus Berlin, Revaler Str. 99, 10245 Berlin
October 14: The Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival, 8 PM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenpl. 2, 10997 Berlin
October 14: Female to Empower 2023, 5 PM, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
October 15: Matana Roberts, 3:00 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
October 15: MOVE (Achim Kaufmann, piano; Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums; John Edwards, bass; Harri Sjöström, soprano saxophone; Emilio Gordoa, vibraphone), Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
October 15: Female to Empower 2023, 6 PM, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
October 15: The Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival, 8 PM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenpl. 2, 10997 Berlin