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A Temperate Avant-Gardist
The New York Times, June 4, 2005
Ben Ratliff
The alto saxophonist Matana Roberts stepped up to introduce her quartet at the Jazz Gallery on Thursday night wearing glitter, face paint, seven pale pink roses pinned to a cutoff denim vest, and a wine-colored taffeta petticoat. She tossed a few more roses on the floor around her as she talked. "Excuse me while I change the atmosphere a little," she said, putting it nicely.
On the outside, Ms. Roberts, who has been working around New York for the last three years, radiates fearless, wall-to-wall hippie-punk energy. There is a famous causal link between that personality type and aesthetic transgression. But jazz isn't easily reduced; it resists transgression, and she knows it. Ms. Roberts comes from Chicago, which breeds a temperate kind of jazz avant-gardist, catholic minded about new directions but inclined to see bebop as earthy and nourishing rather than a venerable, unkillable oppressor. On Thursday, if you closed your eyes, you didn't hear a rebel, but a musician admiring different kinds of form in the last half century of jazz, and seeking to click them into alignment.
After she played two stout, balanced long tones, she indicated a rubato melody, and her band plunged into the recognizable whirl of post-Ornette Coleman form. The trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum generated a babble; the bassist Thomson Kneeland and the drummer Tomas Fujiwara put on a steady boil of rhythm, keeping the song afloat without pointing out the beats and bar lines.
Then there was a break, and all the musicians stopped but Ms. Roberts. In a concise few minutes of solo improvisation, she played one invented melody after another, then built up dense curtains of sound, rolling together low notes and high overtones, a little in the manner of Evan Parker.
Without stopping, she cued the band into an old Dexter Gordon tune, "For Regulars Only," neat and piquant. And in that segue she basically proved her point: having just dealt with some of the most frenetic corners of jazz, she opened up the easy, strolling quality of the Gordon song, and of Gordon's playing.
Later in the set, there were some gurgling, clinking electronics, triggered by Mr. Kneeland. At one point, Ms. Roberts played the clarinet for a placid sequence, before the band started a crescendo of collective skirmishing over a bass pedal. And toward the end, she distributed to her musicians scores notated with bright blots of color rather than musical notes. The result was a skilled blend of avant-garde jazz styles since 1965 or so: from the most unusual stimulus came the most usual music of the night.
Ms. Roberts isn't just mildly curious to expand her medium: she seems driven to do it. But rather than her group sound, it is her own instrumental voice, a calm, melodically organized way of playing, that may do the job first.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company