Matana Roberts Quotes

The saxophone was created to mimic the human voice and I think that's why I gravitated toward the saxophone eventually. I'd loved the clarinet, but there's something about the saxophone that just grabs you.

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.

When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

It's important to interrogate history, it's important to document history, because as a society we need constant reminders of the things that we've done in the past in the hope we can stop repeating these horrible lessons.

It's nice that people can call me an artist and it's nice that I can refer to myself as such, but it also kind of separates me from the common man in a way that I don't wish to be, so craftsperson makes me feel a bit more connected.

Listening to the birds tells you different things about a place. I heard bird sounds I'd never heard before. I heard street sounds and country sounds and city sounds that are very different from what it is I'm used to and I get very fascinated about how that marks a place.

New York is beautiful, but [the South] makes it look like a wasteland.

I have a really big interest in the spirit world: spooks and the things we can't necessarily see but feel.

Someone can do anything they want to you on the outside, but whatever they do to me they cannot destroy what's on my inside. Mentally that cannot be taken away from me, no matter what someone does.

A lot of my video work is super lo-fi on purpose. I'm not trying to become technically super proficient. The only thing I'm interested in becoming technically proficient on is my alto saxophone.

I love working with my hands. The computer has taken over my life in a way that makes me really uncomfortable. I'm trying to find a happy medium that gives me freedom but also still goes back to the idea of craft.

I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

Leading a band is fun, but it's not always something I want to continually focus on. I have my toes in a lot of different things.