The Power of Collective Singing
Matana Roberts live at Alice, August the 30th 2023
Every time I've seen Matana Roberts play live, the show has been completely different. The first time was when they toured with River Run Thee, the third chapter in their impressive Coin Coin series, which explores – and confronts – the personal and collective history of African Americans in the US. It was a striking show that included electronics alongside the saxophone, as well as the visuals that accompanied the performance. A few years later, Copenhagen Jazz Festival paired them up with young Danish piano prodigy Jeppe Zeeberg for a performance at the LiteraturHaus. This time at Alice in Vanløse, it was just Matana Roberts, with an inherited soprano saxophone instead of their usual alto and an improvised set, following the enthusiastic opening act of Flavia Huarachi and Aurelijus Užameckis.
Roberts made the concept of the evening clear from the very beginning, allowing themselves plenty of time for monologues between the musical parts. They paid tribute to the late greats such as Steve Lacy and Peter Brötzmann, not only verbally, but also by doing impressions of their distinctive performance styles. We heard about Roberts' early influences and musical upbringing with their mother who was into singer-songwriters and their father who took them to an Albert Ayler show at the tender age of five when they had (wrongly) concluded that they didn't want anything to do with music. Though Roberts works in different artistic fields, it is their horn that feels like their main connection to their late parents, as they explained.
Along with touching personal reminiscences and hilarious anecdotes, Roberts devoted much of the spoken part of their set to commenting on some burning issues, such as the ongoing (!) COVID-19 pandemic and the perils of touring at the moment, as well as touching on U.S. politics. “If I could get my government to sing together,” Roberts mused on the power and the potential of collective singing. They later pointed out that the US Constitution was written by drunk men – “about a country that wasn't theirs”. All the while, they gently orchestrated the crowd into a backup chant. We learned that when they did something similar in Vienna, the audience promptly broke into four-part harmony. My mind immediately drifted to the rigid classical music milieu of The Piano Teacher and, well, to the famous Vienna Boys' Choir. Suddenly, sticking to our deep “mmmm” seemed perfectly fine.
This was the kind of show that made you wish the temporarily displaced Alice was some kind of smoky basement bar where you sit at a table and sip whiskey. Well, I mean, they put out some tables and chairs, and they probably serve whiskey, and the smoke would probably not be good for the performers, but you get the idea. And while it may have taken a while for Roberts to really settle into the format of a solo performance where the conversation is as improvised as the music, once they did, the show ended on an extremely powerful note.
After a series of short improvisations on their soprano, Roberts riffed off the audience's humming to launch into Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens De Couleur Libres’ “Libation For Mr. Brown: Bid 'Em in…”, which, they explained, borrows the lyrics from singer, poet, and activist Oscar Brown, Jr.'s “Bid 'Em in”. The song itself, sung from the perspective of a slave auctioneer, is heavy enough, but there's an extra layer to it when sung in front of – and with the help of – an audience in a country with a colonial history.
Toward the end, Roberts seemed comfortable enough to even open the floor to audience questions. Someone said something along the lines of, “Can you get us to do a four-part harmony, like in Vienna?” That was funny, we all agreed, as we casually walked out of the venue, even though we had just collectively sung the chorus to a brutal slave auction song.
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Bonus: This is probably a good opportunity to mention that the new Matana Roberts record Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden... will be released later this month:
Photo: Lea Anic