ANCESTRAL ECHOES
Jeremy Dutcher has resurrected and reimagined the traditional music of his Aboriginal ancestors after recovering recordings made 110 years ago in the now-dying Wolastoq language from the basement of the Museum of History. Lynn Saxberg reports.
IF YOU GO
Jeremy Dutcher with Cedric Noel
When & where: 7:30 p.m. May 25, First Baptist Church, 140 Laurier Ave. W. Doors open at 7 p.m. All-ages. Tickets: $17 advance, plus surcharges, available at Vertigo Records, Compact Music locations and www.spectrasonic.com. One of the most remarkable albums of the year thus far has to be Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, the debut recording by Jeremy Dutcher. The 27-year-old operatic tenor reimagines the traditional melodies of his Indigenous ancestors amid a fusion of electronics, pop, rock and jazz, all of it anchored by the discipline of his classical training.
Sung in Wolastoq, his traditional dialect, the result is music that is not only beautiful and haunting, but also serves to preserve a language in danger of extinction.
Dutcher grew up on the Tobique First Nation, one of several Wolastoqiyik reserves in New Brunswick, before moving to Halifax to study music. Five years in the making, the new album was inspired by an archive of 110-year-old field recordings, collected from Dutcher’s ancestors and stored in the basement of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau.
Q How did you find out about this treasure trove of archive recordings?
A Maggie Paul is an elder in my community. I’ve grown up at the feet of this woman for a long time. She knew I was interested in music and song. We were sitting around her kitchen table, talking about the importance of music and what it all means, and I was saying what I really wanted to do was to learn all the songs the people sang here long ago. And she was like, “I’d love for somebody to go (to Ottawa) and get (the recordings) and take them all back because we need to have those songs here again.” Our elders will do that. They’ll drop a challenge for the young people. They won’t pressure. They just sort of plant a seed and step away, to see what a young person does with it. I took it from there.
Q So you went to Ottawa and found the tapes. What was it like listening to those old recordings?
A It was not glamorous. I was in a basement. There were dark walls. Damp environments. Crappy headphones. It was an unremarkable experience, and yet that feeling of getting to hear those voices was this transcendent experience. I felt like I was travelling through time. You can hear them telling jokes, dancing, laughing. Real human moments were captured. It was a profound experience to witness that.
Q Did you have a goal in bringing the music out of the basement, so to speak?
A It comes down to the responsibility of sharing this with my community. That was the goal of the whole project. Accessibility. I wanted to make sure the Wolast people growing up didn’t have to not know these songs anymore. I wanted to take these melodies and dress them up in a way that people would want to listen. I love to go sit and listen to these scratchy recordings but I also understand that not everyone is of that ilk.
Q How did you approach the composition part of it?
A I went to school as a singer but I also play the piano, and I write most of my music on piano. With this project specifically, it all came back to the melodies and really making sure the melody on those old recordings was intact and that I was representing it correctly. The challenge was to take the language at its face and not try to put my lens on what those melodies were, where they were going or what they were doing but just letting the harmonic relationship between the notes dictate how I compose.
Q Some of the melodies are complex. Did that make it more of a challenge?
A It was creation through repetition. I learned these pieces just by doing them over and over. When I finally got to see the score for the first song, on the first page there are 12 time signature changes. There’s a complexity to it that’s not known in what people think of as Indigenous music. Everyone goes to the powwow drum, which is spectacular and an amazing way to make music, but we weren’t powwow people. We had our own forms of gathering.
Q Did you and your brothers speak your language when you were growing up?
A We definitely had an understanding of it. My mother spoke it. It was the only language she spoke when she went to school at age six. It was a day school but had the same sick lessons of cultural shame as residential school. Even my grandmother said, “I’m not going to speak to you in our language anymore. It’s best you don’t know it.” That was the prevailing wisdom. Thank God there’s been a 180 shift in this way of thinking. Our language is everything. It’s what makes us distinct.
Q Is there another album for you based on the archival material?
A I’m very cautious to be pinned as the archive guy. There’s so much material. There are over 100 songs. I used 11. There are tons of photos. I used three. But I’m also understanding that my artistic practice is broader than that archive. As much as I’m a musician, I’m a storyteller, too. There’s an opera I want to write. For so long, our story hasn’t been told on our terms. I feel an urgency in interrupting that and saying, “We’ve been watching, we’ve been listening. We now have the tools and we’re going to kick some butt.”
I wanted to make sure the Wolast people growing up didn’t have to not know these songs anymore. I wanted to take these melodies and dress them up in a way that people would want to listen.