Jerry Cans offer hopeful vision of the North
The band sounds like a square dance that’s been set ablaze.
They play a barnstorming combination of country, Celtic and Inuit music that ignites crowds across Northern Canada. It seems only fitting a group with such an explosive mix of styles would name itself after a gas canister.
When The Jerry Cans took to the stage at Cabaret Lion d’Or in November, they gave the kind of performance that’s earned them a cult following in their hometown of Iqaluit, Nunavut. It featured songs entirely sung in Inuktitut, fiddle solos and Inuit throat singing — all delivered at a blistering pace.
But the music also embodies the band’s central contradiction. While their sound is an expression of unbridled joy, it comes with a subversive undertone.
The few stories about Nunavut that make their way south deal in tragedy; the territory has some of Canada’s highest rates of suicide, poverty and violent crime. But The Jerry Cans offer a hopeful vision of the North. They want their latest album, Inuusiq/Life, to serve as both an inspiration to Inuit youth and a force that disrupts common stereotypes about Nunavut.
“Music from the North, it’s about resilience, it’s about bringing back something that was almost lost,” says Nancy Mike, the band’s throat singer and accordionist. “When missionaries came to colonize the Inuit, they tried to take away the vital parts of our culture. They outlawed shamanism, throat singing and tried to take our language away.
“But you look around Nunavut today and people speak Inuktitut. It’s my first language. And all over the North, young people are learning throat singing. That’s something to celebrate.”
The album was inspired by the peculiar relationship between life and death in Inuit culture, Mike said. After her father passed away two years ago, she gave birth to her second child. She named the girl Laivi, after her father, in keeping with an Inuit custom. It dictates a new child should be named after the last family member to have died.
“Naming our daughter Laivi, it means my dad will continue to live through my daughter,” Mike said. “It gives the name new life.”
Andrew Morrison — Mike’s husband and The Jerry Cans’ lead singer — says it was his father-inlaw who truly immersed him in the Inuit culture. Morrison grew up in Iqaluit, but only began mastering the region’s language through his courtship of Mike. Laivi would take Morrison for weeks-long hunting trips on the tundra and, since the elder didn’t speak English, it forced Morrison out of his comfort zone.
“It was either silence or Inuktitut. There was no third option,” Morrison said. “So that’s where I learned. Here’s this man who was born in an igloo, he’s lived a pretty incredible life, and he’s sharing something with me. When he passed away, it was a huge loss for the community. So naming our daughter after him and the overall theme of our album was very much about taking something beautiful out of something tragic.
“Iqaluit is one of the most beautiful, unique places in the world, and that’s sometimes hard to remember because we’re faced with so many suicides. Almost every month, we have someone in the community who takes their life. It’s very difficult to live there sometimes, but it’s so important to acknowledge when we can celebrate together.”
Even though a good portion of the audience at the Lion d’Or was from Montreal’s tiny Inuit community, Morrison did a lot of explaining between songs. Of course, explanations fall short in communicating the band’s music. It is, Mike said, a true slice of the North.
“In Nunavut, there’s a song for every child. You sing to your child and kind of show them love that way,” Mike said. “Each child has a song and every member in the family, each of them has different songs for that one child.”
As for the band’s use of Celtic sounds — the fiddle and accordion — they are also typical of music along the Arctic coastline. The use of those instruments in Iqaluit traces its history to the 19th-century Scottish whalers who docked their ships near Iqaluit.
Once on shore, they brought the instruments and music of the Highlands with them.
“That kind of square-dancing music became part of the North,” Mike said. “Every Christmas, the whole community does square dances for hours and hours, and I think that’s a big part of how Inuktitut music was influenced.”
The idea to combine the footstomping Highlander rhythms with throat singing, Morrison said, has a uniting quality to it.
“We have indigenous people and non-indigenous people all in a room dancing, celebrating, singing Inuktitut, I think that’s a pretty strong political statement,” he said. “There’s a dominant idea that aboriginal languages are going extinct and if we accept that, it’ll just contribute to that process. So singing in Inuktitut, while it’s not a revolutionary statement, helps shatter negative stereotypes.”
Typical Jerry Cans shows tend to draw a diverse crowd under the dim lights of a legion hall above the Arctic Circle. The band’s appearances rank high on the social calendar of a village accessible only by plane or boat. But their sound is catching on far beyond the frozen desert. After the Lion d’Or show, The Jerry Cans played in Scotland and took off for a trans-Australian tour. They’ve also headlined gigs in New Zealand and across the European continent.
They rarely get to tour in Quebec because of the cost of flying the band and its gear out of Iqaluit, but Morrison said the goal is to start coming into Montreal more frequently as The Jerry Cans’ popularity spreads.
In keeping with the furious pace of their shows, the band didn’t remain idle leading up to their international tour. In October, they launched Aakuluk Music — the first-ever record label to emerge from Nunavut.
“It’s been a little bit crazy, but we’re happy to try and help other artists get a foothold in the industry,” Morrison said. “There’s a sound back home that the rest of Canada needs to hear.”