SOPHOMORE EFFORT
Legendary Nunavut rock band Northern Haze releases first album ... since 1985,
More mind-boggling than the fact that it’s taken Northern Haze 33 years to release its second album is, perhaps, the fact that Northern Haze ever managed to get an album out 33 years ago.
The rock ’n’ roll pride of tiny Igloolik, Nunavut — an Arcticisland hamlet with a population that even today only stands at around 1,700 — Northern Haze has been giving proud voice to Inuit discontent through punkish riff-rock jams sung entirely in Inuktitut since its members were teenage chums smitten with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and scrounging instruments wherever they could find them in the late 1970s.
While the band’s catalog to date consists of just one eponymous record issued through the CBC back in 1985, its occasional gigs here and there in Nunavut are still sufficient cause for excitement that people will gratefully shoulder the considerable expense of flying in from isolated points around the territory to see it play. The guys in Northern Haze are proper rock stars in the North, even if the rest of Canada has never heard of them and they’ve never made a dime from their music. This month sees the release of
Siqinnaarut, a genuinely longawaited second album that Northern Haze itself still can’t really believe exists. It took the sting of tragedy, and the coaxing of the band’s friends and fans at Iqaluit’s young Aakuluk Music label, to make it happen, but happen it has. Northern Haze has a new record, and this time it might actually get heard outside the Arctic.
“I’m absolutely thrilled,” says frontman/guitarist James Ungalaq, 54, down the line from an “absolutely freezing” Igloolik. “Those guys did a really good job. They made us look better than usual. So I’m really happy.”
Aakuluk reissued the Hazers’ 1985 debut last year and helped bring the band to the attention of the music industry “down south” by showcasing it at the inaugural Nunavut Music Weekin the fall of 2017. To make
Siqinnaarut — which means “return of the sun” in Inuktitut — happen, the label convened the five members of Northern Haze and Toronto producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda in a home temporarily converted into a studio in Iqaluit last January, when actual sunlight was in short supply in the dead of the Nunavut winter.
Material wasn’t a problem. Logistics, the huge cost of getting anything done in the north and the complete lack of musicindustry infrastructure in Nunavut were mainly what held Northern Haze back from doing any more recording for all those years, not a lack of stuff to write about. The same issues — chiefly the ongoing fallout from colonialism and cultural suppression amongst Inuit society — that the band was railing against 33 years ago haven’t gone away.
“Absolutely,” concurs Ungalaq. “We’ve got a lot of material to sing about. We’re not running out of material. In Inuktitut, we don’t have very much to listen to when we want to listen to our own language in music. We’ve got lots of material to write about. The changes from nomadic life just came so fast we can’t keep up with modern stuff. We’re still growing into it. So I think we still have a lot to write about. I used to write a lot and now I want to go back to writing a lot again. I’ve got some stuff that never got out so I still have backup.”
Northern Haze will play a hometown show in Igloolik “where it all began” to celebrate the release of Siqinnaarut, but that’s the only plans for gigging the band has at the moment. If you want to see Northern Haze play, you’ll have to travel.
Ungalaq is having knee-replacement surgery next March and, for the time being at least, is content to stay close to home with his grandchildren. He and co-founders Naisana Qamaniq and John Inooya are acutely conscious of the passage of time and mortality — the band lost two of its founding members in just five days 10 years ago when first bassist Elijah Kunnuk succumbed to cancer and then original lead singer, Kolatalik Inukshuk, was murdered — and have recently welcomed Ungalaq’s son, Derek Aqqiaruq, and nephew Allan Kangok into the fold on guitar and keyboards, respectively, in hopes of eventually handing Northern Haze and its music off to a new generation of players. Someone has to keep up the fight, after all.
“It was pretty rough in the be- ginning. Sometimes it was not easy because, you know, we were changing culture and sometimes change gets a lot of resistance from those who want to be responsible for holding authority, and it was hard for them to watch us stray off where they didn’t want us to wander,” says Ungalaq. “But we were little rebels speaking about stuff that was not nice and that was being ignored. We were little punks talking about our pain and suffering and stuff that we didn’t like, you know? They didn’t want that. But sh-, they brought it onto us.”
Andrew Morrison, one of the founders of Aakuluk Music and frontman for rowdy Iqaluit combo the Jerry Cans, already considers it a victory that word on Northern Haze has spread beyond Nunavut’s borders with the release of the new album.
Gig offers are spilling in from Toronto, Montreal and other ports of call, he says, but the fact that the band — whose only gig outside its home territory was at Expo ’86 in Vancouver — is turning them down, only “makes them even more hardcore, in my opinion.”
“It’s very, very cool and DIY and punk to the absolute max, how they roll and how they make music together. It’s amazing to see,” says Morrison. “Northern Haze is one of the most hardcore bands not just in Canada, but all over the world. It’s been a wild ride trying to figure out how to make this album happen, but it’s an album that we’re already seeing people really interested in and the story is amazing — the band is amazing — so there have been lots of challenges, but we know it’s important.
“They’re absolute legends in Nunavut and across the North, so making those connections and helping the rest of Canada realize how awesome they are has been our small role in it all.”
Ungalaq can’t thank Northern Haze’s younger pals at Aakuluk Music enough for cracking the whip and getting another record out of them. “We lost two prominent members who died too soon and we never expected it and we came to a really hard realization that we’re not going to live forever, and Aakuluk came out and Inuktitut music finally has support and it was the perfect storm,” he says. “Me and the guys are growing old and having more grandchildren and we’ve been talking about doing this for 30 years, so it was perfect. I think I’ve gone full circle and I’m happy. I’m happy. I never knew I’d come this far. Hopefully in another 30 years we’ll have another album.”
“We’ve got a lot of material to sing about. We’re not running out of material.” JAMES UNGALAQ NORTHERN HAZE SINGER