Autumn 2022 jazz revelation, sweettoothof the composer, double bassist and leader of band Mali Obomsawin, was greeted with a concert of praise, in America as in Europe. Presented as a “suite for Aboriginal resistance”, the album provokes a fusion between Abenaki tradition and exploratory jazz and reframes the encounter between the old and the new world: “I don’t know if it’s a militant album, nuance however the musician. I feel it more as a way to tell the story of my people” in a modern way that is rooted in the present, she says.
“I have my own way of expressing this story, from the angle of adaptation”, continues the musician, joined at her home in Farmington, a village in southern Maine, where she is resting before resuming the tour with her sextet. “I’m drawn to stories of adaptation because typically people know little about First Nations people, their history, and how they interacted with white people throughout it. »
“When we think of the First Nations, she explains, we think for example of healers or shamans, this kind of stereotypes. Of course, we cherish these traditions, but they mask the efforts our people have made to constantly adapt” to the upheavals caused by the settlers and their culture. “We have always been interested in different forms of art, we are curious and connected to popular culture. We are modern. Throughout our history, we had to imagine, reinvent the way to present ourselves to the rest of the world. Mali Obomsawin found a poignant and sophisticated way to do this: through jazz and the music that rocked her community.
Born in New Hampshire in 1995, she spent her summer vacations in Quebec, regularly visiting the family on the Odanak reserve. She discovered the bass at the age of ten, an instrument which she perfected at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, then continued her studies at Dartmouth College. At Berklee, she will be with the folk-rock trio Lula Wiles, whose latest album, Shame and Sedition, was released in 2021 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The creation of sweettooth began after the trio disbanded.
Heart touching
What a poignant album! Imbued with the spiritual jazz of his idols Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders (on saxophones and bass clarinet, Montreal’s Allison Burik and Noah Campbell, with Taylor Ho Bynum on flugelhorn and cornet), or even the eminent bassist-double bassists Charles Mingus and Charlie Haden. One foot in free jazz, the other in native and American roots music — the gripping Wawasint8da is the translation, in the Abenaki language, of a hymn introduced into the community by the Jesuits — Mali leads the orchestra while singing with her New York colleagues Savannah Harris (drums) and Miriam Elhajli (guitars).
We have always been interested in different forms of art, we are curious and connected to popular culture. We are modern. Throughout our history, we had to imagine, reinvent the way to present ourselves to the rest of the world.
sweettooth is the result of years of digging through the traditional Abenaki repertoire. The album opens with the song Odana — “It’s practically our community’s national anthem,” says the musician — which legendary filmmaker and musician Alanis Obomsawin also sang on her visionary album Bush Lady, originally released in 1985. And, yes, Alanis and Mali are from the same family: “She was there at the launch of my album in Montreal last fall. I asked her for her help with the text, to be sure I understood the meaning, she also explained the story of this song to me, ”says Mali, who regrets not being able to speak the language fluently yet.
The cultural heritage of Mali is displayed on the splendid photo which serves as a cover, crystallized with symbols. In his right hand, the mouthpiece of a trumpet – we want to see a link with the illustrious trumpeter Don Cherry (1936-1995), pioneer of free jazz, friend of Ornette Coleman, born of a African-American father and a Choctaw mother, an indigenous community in the southern United States. “Ah, cool, says Mali. Yeah, I admit it could be interpreted that way, even if it’s not exactly the case. You see, in the other hand I hold pieces of shells from wampum [un collier traditionnel]. It’s a way of putting two objects from two different cultures into conversation to represent the passage of the mind, memory, into sound. »
When she began her tour last winter, Mali Obomsawin made a point of visiting Aboriginal communities to tell them the story of Odanak, in her own way. “I thought a lot about this question: do I have to speak to the indigenous peoples first? I understood that the most important thing was to express myself freely, with my aesthetic choices and my desire to experiment — even if I compose a lot, I am also an improviser and I leave a lot of room for that in my songs —, but I’m also aware that my music isn’t for everyone… Let’s say I don’t want to shout in a cacophony in front of my Elders for an hour! My performances differ from one audience to another — I don’t play in the same way in front of a community audience and an audience of jazz enthusiasts in a Montreal club, even if the two audiences are not mutually exclusive. »
“I think above all that it says a lot about my music, that it can interest such a wide audience”. Mali Obomsawin is already thinking about the follow-up to sweettooth and is preparing, on the sidelines of his jazz project, a shoegaze rock album “with big sounds of electric guitars – we’ll see if the fans I’ve gained thanks to sweettooth will follow me there! »
A few other native jazz figures…