Matana Roberts Presents: "off the record..."

Matana Roberts brings off the record… to Roulette as a new live solo performance piece emerging from the ongoing COIN COIN project. The work moves between memory, imagination, and lived experience, extending a project whose scope joins personal and collective narratives. No instruments are specified for this performance, but the evening is presented as Roberts alone, rather than with a separately named ensemble.

Chicago-born and NYC-based, Roberts is an alto saxophonist, dynamic instrumentalist, and multidisciplinary artist. Their acclaimed COIN COIN has been described as a multichapter work of “panoramic sound quilting,” engaging narrative, history, community, and political expression. Roberts’ work has also connected them with Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar, Reg E. Gaines and Savion Glover, the Oliver Lake Big Band, the Julius Hemphill Sextet, and Merce Cunningham’s dance company; recording credits include Godspeed You! Black Emperor and TV on the Radio. The Skinny called COIN COIN “essential listening in the experimental calendar,” praising the way its narrative and music are “beautifully handled.” Reviewing Memphis, Pitchfork heard Roberts’ voice in a “tranced-out, babble-as-hymnal mode” and the saxophone as “divine noodling, astral magma.”