Mali Obomsawin - Sweet Tooth
October 28, 2022 on Out of Your Head Records
A suite for Indigenous resistance, the new album from Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter Mali 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 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 honor 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-bandleader.
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.
The first movement of Sweet Tooth looks to their ancestral village of Odanak, where Obomsawin is enrolled. Arranging an Abenaki ballad from possibly as early as 1730, “Odana” tells the story (in the Abenaki language) of their village’s founding. Though Obomsawin’s suite tackles difficult questions that sweep across all Indigenous communities, this opening song is very intimate. “It’s the story of my people and why we survived,” Obomsawin explains. “This movement is about the lineal and cultural inheritance that Indigenous people receive from our ancestors.” Renowned Canadian filmmaker and musician Alanis Obomsawin (a relative) recorded this song on her seminal 1988 album Bush Lady. “Lineage” is a composition from Mali Obomsawin that evokes the over 12,000 years of time that passed before the arrival of Europeans in Wabanaki land. Though these millennia are often used to define Native cultures pre-European colonization, the real story is that the Wabanaki have always been open to new ideas, hungry for new technology. They were some of the earliest people recorded by anthropologists in the 19th century, and they embraced recording technology as readily as they’d embraced any other worthy technology brought by outside means.
The second movement of Sweet Tooth juxtaposes two conflicting ideologies: the fire and brimstone of the Jesuit priests, and the spiritual practices of traditional Wabanaki culture. “Wawasint8da” adapts a peculiarly fascinating hymn from the Jesuits that sings of “The Harrowing of Hell.” Describing an obscure belief that Jesus traveled to hell, preaching for dead souls, the hymn was translated from Latin into the Wabanaki language as a way to indoctrinate the people. Music played a pivotal role, both politically and spiritually, in Wabanaki society, but also in their colonization. This hymn was recorded in the 20th century from the singing of Ambroise O’Bomsawin. The second part of the movement, “Pedegwajois,” is an ancient story from the Wabanaki taken from a field recording of Odanak’s Théophile Panadis. It tells of the passage of traditional teachings from one generation to the next, and lives in opposition to the violence and otherworldliness of the Christian hymn that precedes it.
The third movement of Sweet Tooth builds on Obomsawin’s original compositions, highlighting the album’s themes of adaptation under colonialism and the deceitful seduction of assimilation. “This movement is for the living, because we are faced with questions as First Nations,” Obomsawin says, “like ‘How do we define our own communities in ways that are actually reflective of our values? How do we continue to protect ourselves?’” “Fractions” evokes a woozy confusion of borders, bloodlines, and values, while “Blood Quantum” is a direct address to violent and misogynistic policies in North America written to tear Indigenous communities apart. This final track includes a Penobscot language chant written by Obomsawin and relatives from Penobscot Nation celebrating the matriarchs of Indigenous communities that have stood their ground and continue to hold their communities together. As Obomsawin says, “Many Wabanaki communities are matrifocal, so womens’ leadership is and was a key part of our survival.”
Obomsawin tells a story of one of the first Wabanaki people to attend college, how he walked straight down from Odanak in Québec to Dartmouth in New Hampshire along the train tracks. Those tracks had been laid over a traditional route that the Wabanaki had used for centuries to travel South. All across North America, Indigenous pathways underlie the modern society we all share. They’ve been paved over, covered up, whispered away, lied about, scribbled out… It takes a composer and musician of uncommon skill to uncover so much that has been hidden. With Sweet Tooth, Mali Obomsawin tells stories that colonialist North America refuses to acknowledge, and celebrates the many Indigenous artists who came before, who faced an unrelenting system and prevailed by crafting new ideas into new expressions of themselves.