Ach ja. Stewart Smith schreibt heute in seiner Jazz-Kolumne folgendes (mehr hier):
„Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin, named after the freed slave Marie Therese Metoyer, is an epic 12 part work exploring African-American history. While the previous chapters were ensemble jazz recordings – albeit a open form of jazz incorporating elements of folk, gospel, blues, post rock, opera and spoken word – River Run Thee is an extraordinary sonic collage, constructed from loops, field recordings and live overdubs. As to whether this is jazz or not, who cares? What matters is the music – and it is remarkable, weaving together saxophone improv, folk fragments, poetry, accounts of the slave trade and personal testimonies in an approach she calls ‚panoramic sound quilting‘. Working from an elaborate graphic score that incorporates photographs, archival texts and musical notation, Roberts layers her own sung and spoken vocals, saxophone and electronics into a rhizomatic work that disrupts linear narratives and maps points across time. Yet for all its openness of form, River Run Thee is not some amorphous piece of sound art. It’s a deeply compelling work, with a true sense of momentum. Out of the churning mass of ghostly harmonies, echoing chatter and digital noise come arresting vocal lines, both sung and spoken. Even after a couple of listens, certain elements haunt the listener: the cracked voice Roberts uses to recite her grandfather’s poetry, the raw beauty of her saxophone lines, the uneasy contrast between the serenity of environmental recordings of the American South – bird song, church bells – and the harrowing accounts of the slave trade she reads over them. The album’s title echoes the phrase which begins and ends Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and its non-linear, multi-vocal form recalls the book’s strcuture too, as well as more recent works such as M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, a remarkable poetic reconstruction of the 1781 court case following the drowning of African slaves. An astonishing work of history, memory and sensed experience, River Run Thee confirms Roberts‘ place as one of the most important living artists in any field.“
Wunderbar beschrieben.
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When shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?