A NEW TRADITION
A Tribe Called Red melds dance music with age-old beats
In Ottawa, over the past five years, Babylon nightclub has been the place to get down to the hottest DJ sounds.
A Tribe Called Red holds court once a month on Electric Pow Wow night — a showcase of rising Aboriginal DJ talent and First Nations urban culture. DJs NDN, Bear Witness and two-time Canadian DMC champ DJ Shub developed the cultural mashup music they call “Pow Wow Step.”
From its underground origins, this mix of modern dance and traditional drum beats is making international news.
Part of a burgeoning First Nations music scene — woefully ignored by most national taste makers — the group made a mainstream breakthrough this year with a nomination for its self-titled debut album to the Polaris Long List. Just returned from blowing minds at WOMEX World Music Expo in Thessaloniki, Greece, and shows in London, Bear Witness prepares for the upcoming cross-Canada tour.
“This was the first year where they did a DJ component to WOMEX, and it was great to make contact with others in world music 2.0/ world bass scene and perform to that crowd,” Bear Witness says. “We had an incredible reception and understanding, too. There is definitely a lot of people in that area doing very interesting things around culture and cultural politics and bringing it into club music.”
This is important. ATCR is often called a First Nations hip hop act. It isn’t. It doesn’t make music that incorporates just touches or teases of traditional music either. A track like Moombah-Wow blends the rhythmic foundation of pow wow chants and contemporary moombahton — a fusion of house and reggaeton styles — into something genuine and respectful of their heritage (Bear Witness and NDN are Cayuga and Shub is Nipissing Ojibway).
As we tour across Canada, we’re hoping to find time in every place to hook up with people we know and record a session.
— DJ Bear Witness
“We are (electronic dance music) producers and doing something that not very many others are doing, which confronts people who haven’t heard something like us before to try and slot us into a category,” Bear Witness explains. “Native hip hop is a common one but, aside from being DJs, that’s about as far as that goes.”
As producer-DJs, ATCR collaborates with everyone from rappers to, recently, a mother/daughter vocal duo.
As it develops its new live show for festivals and larger venues, the group wants to expand its touring member base.
The music heard on its free downloadable debut CD is a compilation of 11 tracks ATCR has posted over the years on Soundcloud and electricpowwow.com. The group’s manager urged it to package them up as a full length project.
It enabled the Polaris nomination, which got the phone ringing from places like WOMEX and elsewhere. American DJ Diplo gave a nod early on that opened up a lot of doors too. The followup is going to be something quite different.
“We are collaborating with a very famous traditional pow wow music label called Tribal Winds where they are giving us access to their library and for every group that we sample on it, the next album that they put out we will do a remix track for it,” Bear Witness says. “So all these albums will go out with our bonus tracks, which is exciting as a lot of these are young groups more open to future collaborations on and offstage. As we tour across Canada, we’re hoping to find time in every place to hook up with people we know and record a session.”
A DJ for 18 years, Bear Witness admits to being the least musical member of the trio. The other members have formal training, NDN performed vocals in a traditional group for years and also drummed in punk rock group the Ripcordz. Shub has a decade of hip hop production under his belt. Bear Witness finds himself becoming the visuals guy. He recently displayed a video project at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s acclaimed Beat Nation exhibit.
“Increasingly, I’m doing a more in-depth live remixing of visuals as part of ATCR. It’s good for the live show but also enables people to not only go on Soundcloud to check the music but to get to see the videos and get the full experience. The show now includes a lot of synchronizing with ... specific clips, but I see more of a DJ/VJ thing in future.”
While he hopes that his group is “on the tip of an iceberg of a huge movement about to explode” the truth is that the explosion has yet to be sparked. With shows such as CoOp Radio’s ThinkNDN and RPM.fm getting contemporary Indigenous music culture local, national and global exposure it could happen.