Winter installment of Yale’s Ellington Jazz Series hosts genre fluid standup bassist Obomsawin and her band. Mali is a proud citizen of the Odenak First Nation, an indigenous section of central Quebec along the St. Lawrence seaway. Her heritage flows in and out of her work in the form of field recordings, cadence, and wordless vocals. The band was excellent with Allison Burik on alto sax and bass clarinet, Noah Campbell on tenor and soprano sax, Magdalena Abrego on guitar, and brothers Zack and Adam O’Farrill on drums and trumpet respectively. The show starts with an extended bass solo, with Mali plucking while in a trance. Wafer thin with saucer sized earrings, Mali had command of her instrument that was roughly her same size. On one speedy passage, it looked as if Mali was shaking the mast off a sailboat. Burik spent much of her time on the unusual bass clarinet, the hookah of the reed family, it is a hybrid brass and woodwind. Campbell seemed to be a devotee of fire music with Ayler-esque runs on both tenor and soprano. Tiny Abrego was fascinating, she started with bent note shading like David Torn, moved to Henry Kaiser angular solos, and even rock choogled like Jimmy Page, her diminutive size anathema to her sound. The O’Farrill brothers come from Latin jazz royalty, father Arturo and grandfather Chico were big band leaders that served as a proving ground for countless musicians. Obomsawin has a toe in many styles, Deerlady is a shoe gaze duo with Abrego, an excellent recording with roots musician ( and blog favorite) Jake Blount, film scores, and various sized jazz ensembles allow her to compose in many directions. The result was music that was difficult to categorize. One song had a field recording of an elderly Odenak male speaking in his native tongue, the backing music swelled in a buoyant fashion effectively assigning triumphant meaning to his words. Another had Burik and Abrego engaging in a back and forth electrical storm with battling effects pedals. At one point, Mali asked if Yale had divested in Israel to which the crowd yelled “no”. Obviously annoyed, she explained that support of indigenous peoples is contradictory to imperialist policy. Great evening of music, it wasn’t indie, it wasn’t world, it wasn’t jazz…..it was all of the above.
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