Wabanaki bassist, composer and songwriter Mali Obomsawin presents a compositional suite that highlights the art and culture of her people, binding together blues, jazz, hymns and folk songs with an ensemble of exceptional NY improvisers: Savannah Harris (drums), Miriam Elhajli (guitars, voice), Allison Burik (reeds), Noah Campbell (sax) and Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet & flugelhorn).
Label: Out Of Your Head Records Catalog ID: OOYH 017 Squidco Product Code: 32930
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: USA Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Firehouse 12, in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 22nd and 23rd, 2022, by Greg Dicrosta.
"Sweet Tooth from Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter Mali 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, released in October 2022 on Out of Your Head Records, blends Wabanaki stories and songs with compositions addressing contemporary Indigenous life, colonization, and continuity. 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. The compositions reveal threads that bind together blues, jazz, hymns, folk songs, and Native cultures, and foreground the breadth of Indigenous contributions to these genres."-Out of Your Head Records
"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."-Mali Obomsawin
Movement One:
Odana: "The Village," Learned from the singing of Alanis Obomsawin, arranged by Mali Obomsawin. This ballad, likely as old as the early 1700s, is an homage to the Abenaki reservation in Quebec, Odanak, which was founded by our Sokoki and Abenaki ancestors in 1660.
Lineage: Composed by Mali Obomsawin.
Movement Two:
Wawasint8da: "Religious Song," Arranged by Mali Obomsawin. Wawasint8da is a Catholic hymn translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by one of the early French Jesuit priests who lived among the Abenaki. It tells the story of Jesus' Descent into Hell or Hades (also known as 'The Harrowing of Hell') to liberate souls who had died outside of the Catholic faith. Ethnologist Gordon Day documented Odanak's Ambroise O'Bomsawin singing the hymn in the mid-1900s. Folded into this arrangement is also an ancient Wabanaki mourning song called "Sami'metwehu," which Mali learned from Dwayne Tomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe.
Pedegwajois: "Little Round Mountain," Told by Theophile Panadis, composed by Mali Obomsawin. This story is from ancient times before colonization. In the field recording (by Gordon Day), Theophile Panadis of Odanak recounts the tale of a young man receiving a teaching from a metawelinno, which brings him to the middle of Betobagw ("Lake Champlain") during a thunderstorm.
Movement Three:
Fractions: Composed by Mali Obomsawin.
Blood Quantum (Neweweceskawikapawihtawa): Composed and arranged by Mali Obomsawin, additional arr. by Lancelot Knight of Muskoday First Nation. Neweweceskawikapawihtawa This contemporary chant, folded into the Blood Quantum arrangement, is co-written by Mali Obomsawin, Lokotah Sanborn and Carol Dana of the Penobscot Nation. Dana, a grandmother and language keeper for her community, aided in the chant's translation:
"I stand to face him, I face him defiantly, unflinchingly, I confront him. We remember our matriarchs We remember our grandmothers."