“There are some things I just can’t tell you about, honey,” Matana Roberts whispered at one point during “Mississippi Moonchile,” the audacious composition she presented at Tonic on Tuesday night. She also rasped the line, recited it and wrapped it in a songlike testifying tone. Resonating as a ghostly echo throughout the piece, it suggested a voice retrieved from distant memory, or maybe conjured out of dust and air.
Matana Roberts performing “Mississippi Moonchile” on Tuesday.
Ms. Roberts, an alto saxophonist as well as a conceptualist, was sifting through many layers of implication: autobiography, genealogy and the deep mysteries of folklore. As she explained in an introduction, “Mississippi Moonchile” draws inspiration from the life of the Rev. John Roberts, a Southern ancestor on her paternal side. It’s the second chapter of an evolving opus called “Coin Coin,” after Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a legendary matriarch and plantation owner born into slavery in southern Louisiana.
This background would not have been strictly necessary to appreciate the efforts of Ms. Roberts and the six-piece ensemble she led through her sprawling work. A trumpeter, Jason Palmer, countered her saxophone outpourings with clean, geometric patterns. The bassist Hill Green and the drummer Tomas Fujiwara simmered in a way that was both volatile and watchful; they picked up on each of Ms. Roberts’s cryptic cues. Shoko Nagai, at the piano, rumbled chords and raked her fingers across the strings. The soprano Beatrice Anderson sang occasional scraps of spirituals and hymns.
It was strong collective interplay, impressive on its own merits. But Ms. Roberts, through the tone of her spoken-word commentary, made it clear that the music was not to be removed from its context. “Those white folks weren’t bothering us,” she said near the end of the piece, and the ironic poignancy of the statement had a lot to do with the turbulent narrative that had preceded it.
The music told a similar story. Throughout “Mississippi Moonchile,” the band shifted gears and grooves, moving through a host of stylistic regions. There was revival-tent gospel and quick-reflex bebop, along with the sacramental yowl of Albert Ayler. Ms. Roberts, with her bold and declarative saxophone sound, seemed to be striving not toward virtuosity, but a kind of vocalization.
With her face artfully painted and her dreadlocks festooned with rosebuds, she also demonstrated a grasp of aesthetics that live beyond the scope of music. On matanaroberts.com Ms. Roberts describes “Coin Coin” as a “patchwork sound quilt,” and the analogy feels just about right: if there is a nonmusical corollary to her creation, it can be found in the “story quilts” of Faith Ringgold, the acclaimed Harlem visual artist.
“Mississippi Moonchile” is merely one of four existing chapters, and Ms. Roberts clearly has yet more territory to explore. But she knew what she was saying when she thanked the audience for bearing witness. There are some things that just can’t be told about, after all; they can only be experienced.
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