Sweet Tooth is the new album from Wabanaki composer, songwriter, and bassist Mali Obomsawin that uncovers the ley lines behind jazz and Indigenous roots. It’s a new history or, more accurately, a history that’s always been there but has been covered up. Drawing from family songs, archival sources, field recordings, new historical accounts, and years of free jazz and improvisation, this compositional suite is a brilliantly envisioned debut in the vein of artists like Jeremy Dutcher, Alanis Obomsawin, Arooj Aftab, or Albert Ayler.
Alanis Obomsawin, a renowned filmmaker, musician, and relative of Mali Obomsawin, released an album called Bush Lady in the 1980s, which opens with the old ballad Odana. In 2017, Alanis performed songs from that album live for the first time at Le Guess Who? and in her introduction to Odana, she shared how her people’s territory was once “the whole of New England in the US, the Maritimes in Canada and part of the province of Quebec…Then came the English, then the French and Dutch, there were wars for 300 years and our people were pushed off their land.” The festival described Alanis’ work as being bound by crusading for the rights and well-being of indigenous populations while simultaneously celebrating their culture and heritage.
It seems so fitting that the opening track of Sweet Tooth is Odana, learned from the singing Alanis Obomsawin and arranged here by Mali Obomsawin. The album is a suite for Indigenous resistance, on which Obomsawin flies in the face of Western tropes that insist Indigenous cultures are monolithic, trapped in time. Instead, Obomsawin highlights centuries of clever adaptation and resistance that have fueled the art and culture of the Wabanaki people.
Written as a compositional suite, the album Sweet Tooth, coming October 28, 2022, on Out of Your Head Records, blends Wabanaki stories and songs passed down in Obomsawin’s own family with tunes addressing contemporary Indigenous life, colonization, continuity, love and rage. It’s at once intimately personal, featuring field recordings of relatives at Odanak First Nation, but also conveys a larger story of the Wabanaki people, stretching across the domain of their confederacy from Eastern Canada to Southern New England. In three movements, Obomsawin’s powerful compositions honour the Indigenous ability to shape great art from the harshest fires of colonialism. The compositions reveal threads that bind together blues, jazz, hymns, folk songs, and Native cultures, and foreground the breadth and continuity of Indigenous contributions to these genres. “Telling Indigenous stories through the language of jazz is not a new phenomenon,” Obomsawin explains. “My people have had to innovate endlessly to get our stories heard – learning to express ourselves in French, English, Abenaki… but sometimes words fail us, and we must use sound. Sweet Tooth is a testament to this.” Sweet Tooth is a celebration of Indigenous innovation and an ingeniously envisioned debut for this composer-band leader.
Of Odana, the album’s opening song, Obomsawin tells us:
“The first song, “Odana”, looks to the reservation community where I’m enrolled. Odana is a Wabanaki word for ‘the village’ – and Odanak, the name of our Abenaki reservation in southern Quebec, means “at the village.” Writer unknown, this ballad is a homage to this home that our ancestors founded in the late 1600s.
“Odana” tells the story of those ancestors who fled to modern-day Canada to escape biological warfare and scalp bounties (17th & 18th centuries) issued by the English crown in its colonies. The bounty proclamations, in particular, deterred Abenaki families from returning permanently to their ancestral territories by the end of the 18th century. The lyrics warn Abenakis to “be vigilant” so that the ground remains peaceful and they do not lose their newly founded villages at Odanak and “Mazipskoik” at the head of Lake Champlain. The lyrics describe “a great forest extending from the village,” a stolen homeland. Finally, the lyrics thank our forefathers for guarding this place for us and emphasize the importance of this place to the survival of Abenaki people in the face of genocide.”
Odana is available to stream as a single from tomorrow.
Raised on ancestral land in central Maine and in Québec on the Odanak First Nations Reserve, Mali Obomsawin is used to living between linguistic and political borders but also recognizes the absurdity of such dichotomies. When studying jazz at Dartmouth College (founded as an Indian school in 1769 to educate Wabanaki people) with cornetist and co-producer Taylor Ho Bynum, Obomsawin came to find that the voices of their actual ancestors languished in the archives of the college: field recordings of Odanak’s songs and stories kept locked away. Only now are the field recordings featured on Sweet Tooth being repatriated to Odanak. As Obomsawin became a masterful bassist and immersed themselves in the tradition’s history, they came to learn that many jazz greats themselves were Native, and indeed many of the core principles of American music, like the four on-the-floor beat or the swing of the drum, were influenced by Indigenous musical ideas.
Recently, Native musicians are reclaiming the histories of their predecessors in jazz–artists like Don Cherry, Oscar Pettiford, Jim Pepper, Mildred Bailey, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Patton, and more who were Native. Even the earliest precepts of jazz–military marching bands–tied back to Obomsawin’s family history. As the Jesuits and militaries brought marching band instruments to Indigenous land, they laid the seeds of jazz in Wabanaki communities. It’s a history that can only be understood by looking unflinchingly at the legacy of genocide and colonization.
Pre-Order Sweet Tooth via Bandcamp: https://outofyourheadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sweet-tooth
https://www.maliobomsawin.com/
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