“It’s important for folks far from where I’m from to hear the sounds of the place I come from,” says composer and bass player Mali Obomsawin on the phone from Portland, Maine, about 90 miles south of where she was raised in the small city of Farmington. “Sharing cultural particularities of place,” she adds, “is very important.”
Obomsawin will present that musical mission with her touring quintet at SFJAZZ on Nov. 7. For those unfamiliar with her recorded output of the last several years, she notes that “you can definitely expect Indigenous original compositions, either new or ancient, through the language of free jazz or improvised music.”
Obomsawin is a member, through her father, of the Odanak First Nation of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The 29-year-old’s debut recording, Sweet Tooth, released by Out of Your Head Records in 2022, showcased a fascinating integration of her heritage of song, chant, and storytelling in the traditional Abenaki language with exciting solo and ensemble jazz expression. Much of the latter was improvised, and that material will form a good part of the program for her pair of shows in the intimacy of the Joe Henderson Lab.
After Sweet Tooth’s international acclaim, Obomsawin broadened and strengthened her fan base with the ironically titled Greatest Hits, her debut release as part of Deerlady, her rock duo with guitarist Magdalena Abrego, who will join her at SFJAZZ. The duo’s name is an homage to Obomsawin’s contributions to the soundtrack of the popular TV series Reservation Dogs, specifically to the show’s spirit character with cloven hooves.
In another duo collaboration, Obomsawin released Symbiont with composer-performer Jake Blount this year, a recording described by the Smithsonian Folkways label as a “radical new collaborative album and document of Black and Indigenous futurism.” With ear-tingling instrumentation, the pair rework hymns, gospel, and chants with messages of environmental warning but much respect for spiritual and musical tradition.
Growing up in the foothills of western Maine, Obomsawin developed “a deep reverence for the beautiful living folk tradition there, as well as a need to not have the people’s music only signify white traditions.” She says that with her father Thomas, “I was jamming, playing Native music and regular American music. Obviously, there’s a powwow scene, and people do drum groups, but my dad used to play blues and rock [guitar] at powwows.”
At a supportive public elementary school, Obomsawin worked her way through violin, cello, clarinet, and bass. Jazz came to her at camps on the University of Maine at Farmington campus, under the influence of visiting instructors from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “The first jazz tune I ever played at camp was ‘Lonely Woman,’” she says. The song’s composer, Ornette Coleman, is one of several progressive-jazz icons, along with Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane, whose collective spirit is audible in Obomsawin’s own music.
Financial limitations led to her choosing an abbreviated diploma of music program at Berklee rather than pursuing an undergraduate degree, and she then went on to Dartmouth, which has had “a great program for Indigenous students since the ’70s,” Obomsawin says. There, she studied under cornetist and flugelhornist Taylor Ho Bynum, “working on composing and arranging and just listening to music. I also liked his critical lens applied to the institutionalization of jazz.
“His attitude was very encouraging of folks having different entry points into [jazz] other than your standard, straight-ahead music school,” she continues about Bynum. “In the old days before it was stolen and reinvented by institutions, people came into the music from the streets.” Bynum later joined Obomsawin in the studio on Sweet Tooth.
Among current artists “dedicated to shining a light on all of the precedence for Indigenous jazz participation and influence in the genre,” Obomsawin counts Bynum as well as her Indigenous peers Julia Keefe (from the Nez Perce tribe) and Delbert Anderson (Navajo), both of whom appeared in SFJAZZ’s Indigenous Songbook series this past August. Together they’re drawing attention to “lots and lots of Black musicians from the South who are actually second- or third-generation Indigenous folks and honoring the ones who were really vocal about that, like Oscar Pettiford, Mildred Bailey, and ‘Big Chief’ Russell Malone.”
Obomsawin’s latest project was scoring the Sundance award-winning Sugarcane, a documentary by Julian Brave NoiseCat of Canada’s Secwepemc Nation and Emily Kassie. “It’s a story of the resilience of Indigenous communities in the face of the residential school system that was put in place by the Canadian and United States governments,” says Obomsawin. “It follows an active investigation into unmarked graves at the schools, which [Secretary of the Interior] Deb Haaland is doing a really good job of pushing forward.” (Joe Biden last month issued an apology for the “sin” of government-run boarding schools.) The film, which was released in select theaters on Aug. 9, is set to stream on Disney+ and Hulu in December.
Obomsawin hopes to do more work for films and to “keep writing the music that I hear.” She says that “it’s been a dream to do SFJAZZ,” where she’ll perform alongside Abrego on guitar, Allison Burik on reeds, Rafael Luna on flute, and Evan Woodle on drums. “I love coming out to the Bay Area. I feel so comfortable out there. And I just might get another tattoo.”
