Matana Roberts Quartet - "The Chicago Project"

Matana Roberts Quartet - "Thrills" (Central Control 2008)

Matana Roberts Quartet – The Chicago Project / Central Control

It has gotten to the point where I think it is justifiable to use the AACM as a subgenre tag within jazz. It is certainly not because the long-lived non-profit Chicago organization schools artists in a redundant style of progressive jazz; it’s because the highly talented members and students all seem to emit a specific vibe of spirituality, and in turn specific sound quality, with their music. With an ethos of obsessively forward-pushing experiments, the music of AACM members tends to encounter a cross-section of stylistic jazz niches: post-bop, modal, modern creative, free, avant-garde, experimental big band, soul-jazz, African and Afro-Cuban. It never settles on a singular method, instead letting the player reflect on the elder statesmen of the group, and then forcing the individual to look inside to create their own idiosyncratic sound. The adjectives ‘earthy’ and ‘spiritual’ almost always come to mind, and for good reason. This is emotional music, never straight cacophony and never simply melodious. It’s music that speaks to that inner ear and the complexities of human emotions.

The now NYC-based reedist Matana Roberts is one of the youngest current members of the AACM. She heartily enlivens the ethos established by her senior teachers, including developing her own musical concept (Panoramic Sound Quilting) to build a series of sound-montage based concerts (Life Lines) and a specific on-going familial and ancestral narrative called Coin Coin. And in the same breath, she is able to exist and contribute in contemporary music’s interlocking collaborations, appearing on recordings by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Daniel Givens, Savath y Savalas, Guillermo E. Brown, and as a member of Sticks and Stones, amongst many others. For her latest venture as a bandleader, Roberts has formed a quartet with three of her fellow hometown luminaries, all interestingly enough of about the same age. With guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Frank Rosaly, The Chicago Project is a prime example of Chicago’s contemporary AACM sound. Behind Roberts exhaustively emotional alto saxophone, the band lulls and shrills, pleads and exclaims, croons and wails, all the while blurring the lines between easily-defined stylistic tags and singular expressions.

The most accessible and thematic of the pieces, “Thrills”, comes early in the hour-long album. Parker introduces one of those rousing and cyclical electric guitar phrases that have become his penchant as Tortoise’s chief melody-maker with Roberts closely in tow. Rosaly’s increasingly chaotic drum rolls spur Roberts to drop into counterpoint before everyone releases just in time for Abrams to deeply pluck a husky bass line that is downright bluesy. After returning to the theme a number of times in the first half of the song, the track breaks down into clustering individual and seemingly improvised lines by each player never again reintroducing the initial phrase. “Nomra” is also deserves special mention as Roberts’ saxophone takes on a warm and somber tonal quality. Somewhat a lulling tune, it would evoke reflections of Coltrane’s late-50s Prestige output (especially Lush Life), if only Grant Green would have been part of the session.

On three tracks, Roberts is solely joined by Fred Anderson, one of her most notable influences and a founding member of the AACM. Anderson’s full, bluesy tone swings perfectly with Roberts’ more cutting quality. Each of the dichromatic songs, “Birdhouse 1”, “Birdhouse 2” and “Birdhouse 3”, features a sort of theme setting-and-reaction call-and-response from the two saxophonists. Both players sound perfectly in tune with each other stylistically as they trade and interlace aerobic lines of improvisation. As each track progresses, you almost lose track of which tone belongs to which player.

Despite now residing in New York City, the Chicago spirit and AACM sound will never be completely lost on Roberts, not that I suspect the move was to try and distance herself from her upbringing. It very well could have been an attempt to spread her learned sound and influence other players in a new geographic location. Either way, The Chicago Project is a prime example of what excellent, forward-pushing-yet-rooted music the younger generation of AACM members is capable of producing. It can almost be looked at as the contemporary sound of the legendary institution. And on a completely surface level, it is just a fine jazz record.