Jazz rarely brings tears to one’s eyes, but here is an exception. The Coin Coin project expresses the most dramatic human emotions ever heard on jazz albums. It reminds us of what should never have been, what should no longer exist, and that humanity should be one.

So, if one of humanity’s tragedies is its inability to recognize itself and to understand that the other is oneself, then the Coin Coin project brings this tragedy to life deep within us, making it–through illumination mainly–accessible essentially.

Initiated in 2011, the Coin Coin project is an ongoing 12-chapter audio-history series created by American saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts [1], designed to map the multi-generational trajectory of the African American experience. Named after Marie Thérèse Metoyer [2] (known as “Coincoin”), a legendary 18th-century enslaved woman who bought her own freedom, the project functions as what Roberts call “panoramic sound quilting” [3]. Musically, it mixes free-jazz improvisation, avant-garde composition, traditional folk melodies, gospel hymns, and operatic arrangements. Narratively, it brings to light deeply personal familial histories, oral testimonies, and historical archives. While five chapters have been released so far, no timeline has been shared regarding the release of the remaining seven. 

This article aims to detail where the project stands today, share personal notes and views, and follow its progress in the years ahead with each new release.

• Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres (2011) explores the legacy of the American slave trade and the lives of the “free people of color” in antebellum Louisiana, channeling the traumatic history of human bondage through an ancestral slave auction.
• Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (2013) focuses on a deeply personal familial story, tracking Roberts’ grandmother as she navigates poverty, segregation, and the Jim Crow South while growing up along the banks of the Mississippi.
• Chapter Three: River Run Thee (2015) functions as a deeply personal, solitary sound collage that utilizes Roberts’ own text and field recordings to meditate on the roots of slavery, navigation, and the historical geography of the American South. 
• Chapter Four: Memphis (2019) relates the harsh, handed-down memory of a young girl fleeing into the woods for survival in Tennessee after her parents are tragically murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
• Chapter Five: In the Garden… (2023) weaves a poetic narrative around reproductive rights and systemic oppression, honoring an ancestral relative who tragically lost her life due to complications from an illegal abortion. 
• Chapter Six, provisionally titled Papa Joe, is expected to follow, although very little has yet been revealed about it [4].
• The Next Chapters: the living legacy of Coin Coin.

---

Chapter One is the first official release of the Coin Coin project and established many of its defining elements. It was recorded as a 90-minute live in-studio performance before a small audience at Hotel2Tango [5], with approximately 60 minutes selected for the final release. Gens de couleur libres—French for “free people of color”—takes the life of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, an eighteenth-century enslaved woman [6] who later gained her freedom and helped establish a community of free people of color in Louisiana, as a starting point for its broader narrative of slavery, resistance, faith, and liberation.

Jazz, by nature, addresses existential questions as well as social and political issues. Although it is most often approached as a purely musical or artistic form, it can also allow musicians to express themselves in uniquely charged and emotional ways.

Naturally, the emotional impact of jazz varies with the artist’s intentions and the listener’s personal experiences, cultural background, and preferences. Yet, over time, listeners often find common ground. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, for example, has become a cornerstone of the genre because its music is so singular and beautiful that it allows us to grasp something of transcendence.

I would dare say another album deserving similar recognition is Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres—and, by extension, the entire project. Its music confronts us with our humanity in ways few (if any) other jazz albums have done. With each listen, it is impossible not to be moved by the beauty of the music, the precision of the words, the pain expressed, the absurdity exposed, and the cruelty denounced.

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
–Victor Hugo

Matana Roberts: reeds, voice; Gitanjali Jain: voice; David Ryshpan: piano, organ; Nicolas Caloia: cello; Ellwood Epps: trumpet; Brian Lipson: bass trumpet; Fred Bazil: tenor sax; Jason Sharp: baritone sax; Hraïr Hratchian: doudouk; Marie Davidson, Josh Zubot: violin; Lisa Gamble: musical saw; Thierry Amar, Jonah Fortune: bass; David Payant: drums, vibes; Xarah Dion: prepared guitar

Released May 10, 2011

---

Chapter Two focuses on a deeply personal familial story. The entire record is built around verbatim conversations and recorded interviews that Roberts conducted with their grandmother, tracing her life as a poor Southern girl growing up in Mississippi. Roberts paints her as the “Mississippi Moonchile”—an ethereal, imaginative, and deeply spiritual woman who yet survived the hardships of the Great Depression, World War II, and Jim Crow laws [7].

A smaller group than usual for the series performs it—apart from the solo chapter, of course—yet they sound far more numerous than they are. Influenced perhaps by the cover art, we imagine we are about to listen to a large ensemble. Or, with all the voices rising and disappearing alongside the free playing, an effect of chaos is created; it absorbs us into what feels like a disorganized rehearsal, aside from when Roberts takes the lead voice to restore clarity in the midst of the confusion. But most probably, it is simply because the sextet went into the recording sessions after several years of performing these pieces together: they knew exactly how to play each part to translate Roberts’ intentions: “an uninterrupted, incantatory swirl of through-composed music, where thematic structure and free improvisation are propelled in continual and fluid co-existence.” [8]

So, even though it is divided into 18 tracks, Chapter Two remains a cohesive, album-length piece. Ultimately, more than the individual tracks themselves, Roberts’ vocal delivery—marked by raw spoken word, fragmented narratives, and a gritty “speak-singing”—paves the way to convey their grandmother’s literal testimony.

“This music is a love letter to my country in so many ways.”
–Matana Roberts

It is a love letter without idealization, and the music embodies this tension throughout: abrasive improvisation and fractured voices give way to gospel inflections, lyrical melodies, and moments of unexpected tenderness. Through these contrasts, Roberts confronts the violence of the past while preserving a life shaped by it.

Matana Roberts: alto saxophone, vocals, conduction, “wordspeak”; Shoko Nagai: piano, vocals; Jason Palmer: trumpet, vocals; Jeremiah Abiah: operatic tenor vocals; Thomson Kneeland: double bass, vocals; Tomas Fujiwara: drums, vocals

Released October 1, 2013

---

Chapter Three is actually the least favored in the series from the listeners’ point of view, although its rating of 4.21/5 on Discogs.com is still very good [9]. For Roberts, however, it is the first—and so far only—chapter conceived and recorded as a solo work, making it perhaps the most personal of the series to date. The release let them dig deeply into what they needed to express, not only through the music itself but also through the process of creating it, which included the journey they called #southernsojourn2014.

The #southernsojourn2014 [10] refers to the 25-day solitary road trip Roberts took through the American South in early 2014 to prepare for the work to come. Traveling through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, Roberts gathered historical material, conducted interviews, and captured extensive field recordings. These recordings and documents later became the sonic backbone of Chapter Three.

The title river run thee operates as a powerful metaphor. Historically, it could evoke the Southern rivers that served as slave-trade routes and pathways to freedom, while its lowercase formatting nods to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, reinforcing the theme of looping time.

Though it feels like an uninterrupted suite, the track listing explicitly charts historical oppression and ideological hypocrisy. By sequencing the sprawling “All Is Written” into “The Good Book Says,” Roberts highlight how fate and religion were weaponized to justify chattel slavery. Similarly, “This Land Is Yours” subverts standard folk promises to spotlight forced labor and displacement. The album finally anchors its looping soundscape in the origins of American white supremacy by closing with “J.P.”—a direct reference to John Punch [11], the first colony-sanctioned enslaved person for life.

Listening to the music, one hears a long collage of sounds, voices, and layered saxophones. It is like discovering a story through a fog, amid the humid, oppressive heat of the South, clouding both sight and thought. Our perception seems hindered; the story slips away as though lost to time, leaving us to catch only fragments—much like the orchestra itself, which is no longer there. The sound collage conveys this hazy atmosphere: everything seems on the verge of vanishing—or perhaps emerging; one can no longer tell. It feels exactly as Roberts describes it: a fever dream of sound.

“…herein lies a fever dream of sound for your esteemed consideration. A fever dream in sound of my love for the tallest tales, heartist stories, and most forlorn-est memory…”
–Matana Roberts

So yes, Chapter Three differs significantly from the others, with its experimental blend of sound collage and drone. Yet it remains a very strong chapter: haunting and ethereal, deeply meaningful, and entirely coherent within the wider project. And to end with another quote from Roberts, they offer the following advice for the listening experience:

“Best heard in a dark room, loud, in one sitting, completely undisturbed, with someone you love, who also perhaps loves you too?”
–Matana Roberts

Matana Roberts: alto saxophone, Korg Monotrons, “wordspeak”, upright piano

Released February 3, 2015

---

Chapter Four develops a story passed down by Roberts’s Memphis-born grandmother about a young Black woman whose mixed-race parents were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, forcing her to flee and survive alone in the woods. The city’s name, Memphis, therefore anchors the protagonist’s partly remembered, partly reconstructed story and becomes the point where family memory, Southern racial violence, folklore, and Black musical history converge to birth that extraordinary music. 

“The record is my attempt to say, ‘I don’t know Memphis, but I want to know Memphis because I know that Memphis represents something in me that’s still unknown to me.’”
–Matana Roberts

As always, the track listing traces a movement through violence. But for the first time in the project, Roberts introduces the cryptic imagery of the Sphinx—a symbol of stoic survival and ancient, guarded secrets—alongside precious metaphors in their titles. By calling these memories and ancestors “jewels” or crowning them in “gold,” Roberts undoubtedly reframe their maternal grandmother’s history as something incredibly valuable, beautiful, and resilient that deserves to be told and shine brightly.

“I am a child of the wind” is a recurring motif throughout the album. When Roberts deliver it in their exceptional voice, it perfectly captures the radiant beauty of a child. It holds the pride, innocence, and infinite love and hope that children carry within themselves. 

But this motif is immediately shadowed by another: “Even daddy said so. He said run, baby, run — run like the wind.” Bearing in mind the father’s murder, which the child had to escape from, this second phrase retroactively twists the graceful, innocent motif, giving it a dramatically different, untold meaning that is dreadfully sad. The entire release beautifully builds a dissonant, exhausting, yet extraordinarily touching musical experience around these key, irreconcilable motifs, of which even the main character herself does not seem to grasp the implied horror. 

Matana Roberts: alto sax, clarinet, wordspeak, voice; Hannah Marcus: electric guitar, nylon string guitar, fiddle, accordion, voice; Sam Shalabi: electric guitar, oud, voice; Nicolas Caloia: double bass, voice; Ryan Sawyer: drumset, vibraphone, jaw harp, bells, voice | Guests: Steve Swell: trombone, voice; Ryan White: vibraphone; Thierry Amar: voice; Nadia Moss: voice; Jessica Moss: voice.

Released October 18, 2019

---

The title In the Garden… plays on the traditional association of the garden with beauty, marvels, and femininity. However, Roberts subvert this idyllic image to reveal a darker purpose: the garden becomes a sacred space for hiding secrets and burying uncomfortable truths about women’s lives.

To bring this hidden history to light, Matana Roberts use their voice—delicate yet profound, clear yet deep, and absolutely sublime—to enhance the album’s narrative. Through their powerful delivery, they center the album’s core ideas around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, focusing on a direct ancestor who tragically died from complications following an illegal abortion.

The key mantra here is: 

“My name is your name / Our name is their name / We are named / We remember / They forget.”

“My name is your name / Our name is their name” helps Roberts express that this trauma belongs to a collective lineage of women; the past ancestor, the living artist, and we, the listeners, become one because it is our shared history. Furthermore, its often collective delivery is meant to evoke a united front, a sense of community for an ancestor whose “clandestine destiny” was originally shrouded in forced silence. 

“We are named” functions as a way of pulling her out of anonymity and claiming identity over shame. 

“We remember / They forget” serves to keep oral history alive against “they”—the institutional, patriarchal, and antiseptic revisionists of society who choose to rewrite, sanitize, or completely forget the heavy costs borne by women throughout history. 

Around the time of In the Garden…‘s release, Roberts toured the world, performing many of their shows solo. Here, the word “performance” takes on its full meaning. They are what you could truly call a total artist, capturing the audience so profoundly through their presence, instrumentation, storytelling, and singing. During these sets, it felt as though rooms were emptied of their air as the artist absorbed it all, everything held captive by their exceptional being. It was mesmerizing. 

Ultimately, this is where the greatest strength of the entire Coin Coin project, of Matana Roberts, and of their music lies: in the duality of feelings experienced simultaneously, where sadness and sorrow—evoked by the substance—become intertwined with brightness and delight—evoked by the form. It is both harrowing and unforgettable. 

Matana Roberts: composer, horns, harmonicas, aux percussion, vocal, wordspeak; Mike Pride: drums, aux percussion, vocal; Matt Lavelle: alto clarinet, pocket trumpet, tin whistle, vocal; Stuart Bogie: bass clarinet, clarinet, tin whistle, vocal; Cory Smythe: piano, vocal, tin whistle; Mazz Swift: violin, vocal, tin whistle; Darius Jones: alto sax, tin whistle, vocal; Ryan Sawyer: drums, aux percussion, vocal; Gitanjali Jain: text collage; Kyp Malone: synths; Jaimie Branch: (who was due to play on the album) courage

Released September 29, 2023

---

Coin Coin: The Next Chapters

The Quietus wrote that “one can only assume that when the 12-album cycle is completed, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of twenty-first century sonic and narrative art,” but I wonder if Roberts will ever finish this project.

“Maybe because it’s so rooted in my bloodline [the series] feels like a beacon—some place I’m able to go back into and know that I’m home and I’m welcome there. It’s my blanket and universe, and I feel some sense of love in that work that I don’t get from any of the other work that I make.”
–Matana Roberts

Part of me really wants it to happen, to discover piece by piece the plan they had in mind when defining these 12 steps. A project that follows a rhythm that lets you grow and change properly, entirely, while you wait for it. A timeframe that properly captures the incredible dimensions of the subject, of history, and how it affects lives.

And part of me wouldn’t mind not seeing an end to it. Maybe partly because life is like that, and as expressed to that point in Coin Coin, many things in life are not under our control or wished, or meant to happen. But even if we don’t have to agree with it, it happens. Maybe also because, in this way, we would not define exhaustively what cannot be defined exhaustively. It would feel strange to add a final point to this memorial work, implying there is nothing more to uncover or grasp out of it.

If it were an end, I would understand it for the artist. It would be a way for them to close a chapter (a series of chapters in this case), make it properly part of them, and move forward, grown by it, through it. It would be effectively an amazing piece of art, fully completed.

For the listeners, or at least for me, it may make it too concrete, too physical, to know I have the 12 releases in my collection, as objects that could capture the entirety of the all the ideas planned to be shared. I would rather keep the ethereal idea of something not yet finished, in progress, to come, to be revealed progressively.

But of course there is a high probability that Matana Roberts have already figured it out. I don’t doubt their artistic talent, and I can’t even imagine what the seven remaining chapters could hold.

I am just terribly impatient to listen to the next one.

---

Notes:

[1] Matana Roberts, born in 1975, is an American sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, composer and improviser based in New York City.[2] They have previously been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and a member of the B.R.C. (Black Rock Coalition) (Wikipedia)

[2] Marie Thérèse dite Coincoin, also known as Marie Thérèse Métoyer (born Coincoin with no surname; August 1742 – 1816), was a planter, slave owner, and businesswoman at the colonial Louisiana outpost of Natchitoches, later known as Natchitoches Parish. (Wikipedia)

[3] “I’m trying to codify my own system, and I’m calling it, for lack of better words, panoramic sound quilting.” Matana Roberts (Tinymixtapes.com)

[4] “Papa Joe” is believed to refer to Joseph D. Howard, Roberts’s musician and composer ancestor. Roberts has explained that he taught himself to read as an adult by copying passages from the Bible onto music paper and left behind approximately one hundred compositions. Some of his music already appears in Chapter Two, sung by Jeremiah Abiah (Red Bull Music Academy). An early version of Chapter Six: Papa Joe was performed live in New York in 2012 by an ensemble featuring Roberts, cellist Daniel Levin, pianist Shoko Nagai, bassist Thomson Kneeland, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (Time Out). No recording or release date has been announced yet.

[5] Hotel2Tango has become something of a sonic home for the Coin Coin project. Chapter One was recorded there with a large ensemble drawn largely from Montréal’s experimental-music community, and (nearly) every subsequent chapter released so far has passed through the studio for recording or mixing. The continuity provided by engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh has helped preserve the project’s identity even as its instrumentation, personnel, and musical form have changed, sometimes radically, from one chapter to the next (Wikipedia).

[6] The album’s story begins the cycle in 1742, the birth year of freed slave entrepreneur Marie Thérèse Metoyer, whose nickname was “Coin Coin” (also a nickname given to Matana by their grandfather) (Constellation Records)

[7] The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century that enforced racial segregation (Wikipedia).

[8] Constellation Records

[9] Discogs.com ratings so far:

• Chapter one: 4.54/5 (169 ratings)
• Chapter two: 4.24/5 (97 ratings)
• Chapter three: 4.21/5 (97 ratings)
• Chapter four: 4.44/5 (108 ratings)
• Chapter five: 4.45/5 (51 ratings)

[10] Since then, Roberts has deleted many of their social media posts, and unfortunately, little trace of this journal remains. Yet the album, along with its liner notes, translates the journey’s core ideas and outcomes into sound and words.

[11] John Punch (c. 1605 – c. 1650), also referred to as John Bunch, was an African-descended (and possibly African-born) resident of the English colony of Virginia who became its first person legally enslaved under its criminal law. In contrast, John Casor became the colonies’ first person legally enslaved under civil law, having committed no crime (Wikipedia)

---