Mali Obomsawin.
“It’s good to be in the building where we recorded this album,” said Mali Obomsawin at the beginning of her sextet’s set at Firehouse 12 on Friday night. “Feels full circle. It’s good to be back.”
The album in question was Sweet Tooth, which was recorded in January 2022 and released in October to international acclaim and a long string of tour dates. With Sweet Tooth, the composer and bassist combined elements of traditional Abenaki song and free jazz to make a statement about the past, present, and future of her people. “Telling Indigenous stories through the language of jazz is not a new phenomenon,” Obomsawin explains on her website. “My people have had to innovate endlessly to get our stories heard — learning to express ourselves in French, English, Abenaki… but sometimes words fail us, and we must use sound. Sweet Tooth is a testament to this.”
On the album, and in the full live performance of it at Firehouse 12, Obomsawin showed how powerful that sound could be.
The sextet — Obomsawin on bass, Magdalena Abrego on guitar, Allison Burik on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Noah Campbell on soprano and tenor saxophone, Cedric Easton on drums, and Nolan Tsang on trumpet — was ready from the first moment. The first piece, “Odana,” was based on a centuries-old ballad that “is an homage to the Abenaki reservation in Quebec, Odanak, which was founded by our Sokoki and Abenaki ancestors in 1660,” as Obomsawin writes in the album’s liner notes. It opened with Obomsawin singing and playing, a simple melody that the horns augmented with a bed of chords. Easton offered a wash of drums as foundation. Then Obomsawin began a deep rhythm that the drums picked up. They provided the foundation for Tsang to take a gnarled, declaratory solo. Burik responded with fluttering passages from alto saxophone.
The sound of the band shifted into the next piece, “Lineage,” anchored by chiming chords from the guitar as Obomsawin and Easton kept the pulse. Burik and Campbell on soprano began creating nervous chaos that Tsang joined in on; together they turned the music into a frantic yet focused cacophony. Then it all fell away, letting Obomsawin take a short trip of her own. It was a stunning introduction to a set that would only grow in intensity and emotion.
Obomsawin explained that “Odana” was the Abenaki national anthem. “It tells the story of our survival,” she said. She explained that the Abenaki once held land across the northeast of the United States and Canada, heading possibly as far south as the Hudson river valley, though that may have been impeding on Mohawk territory. The Mohawk, she explained, “are our historical enemies, but now we’re good friends.”
The next piece, “Wawasint8da,” was based on “a Catholic hymn translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by one of the early French Jesuit priests who lived among the Abenaki,” the liner notes explain. “It tells the story of Jesus’ descent into Hell or Hades (also known as ‘The Harrowing of Hell’) to liberate souls who had died outside of the Catholic faith. Ethnologist Gordon Day documented Odanak’s Ambroise O’Bomsawin singing the hymn in the mid-1900s. Folded into this arrangement is also an ancient Wabanaki mourning song called ‘Sami’metwehu,’ which Mali learned from Dwayne Tomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe.” Easton turned the hymn into a march, the horns like a choir underneath Obomsawin’s voice. Abrego then added a wail from the guitar that became an invitation. The other horns followed suit, taking the harmonies and then the melody itself apart, as Obomsawin kept singing. For a few exhilarating minutes, the juxtaposition was at its most tense; then the band turned the hymn inside out in a explosion of sound that died away, into the next piece, “Pedegwajois.” That began with just Obomsawin on voice and bass and the sound of a recorded voice — that of Abenaki storyteller Theophile Panadis, retelling “the tale of a young man receiving a teaching from a metawelinno, which brings him to the middle of Betobagw (“Lake Champlain”) during a thunderstorm.a spiritual encounter on Lake Champlain,” the liner notes explain. But before the story was over, Abrego introduced a new idea that gave rise to an anthemic melody from the horns. Now their explorations felt like freedom, ecstasy, transformation.
Moving into the final pieces on Sweet Tooth, “Fractions” and “Blood Quantum (Nəwewəčəskawikαpáwihtawα),” Burik — who, in a band uniformly bursting with fierce talent, requires special mention for some transfixing, revelatory playing on bass clarinet — began a call and response with Obomsawin’s bass, with the drums providing a sweep of sound. The song emerged as the other musicians fell in, then, with a swell, opened up into a wider harmonic and textured, without ever losing the thread of the melody they had followed to get there.
Easton followed that with a drum solo that concentrated on the sounds of the toms, falling in and out of time, echoing the rhythms of speech. He gathered energy as he went, until he reached a fast, galloping rhythm that Obomsawin used to take a sharp, angular solo. Phrases came out in short bursts; she built tension through long, extended silences. Tseng followed suit on trumpet. Abrego unleashed a roar of distorted guitar, and the band rocked on a sound like fractured funk that ended in a warbled, woozy drone created by the bass and all the horns, creating space for another aching melody sung by Obomsawin.
As the set continued, the band only warmed up more, and began to draw audible sounds from the reverent audience. Obomsawin announced that the ensemble would try a few new ideas. These, if anything, were even more intense that the transporting material that preceded it. On one number, as Easton and Obomsawin dug deep into a driving rhythm, Tseng scorched through a solo that drew spontaneous cheers from the audience. Campbell and Easton did a mesmerizing, skittering duet on soprano sax and drums that allowed Campbell to make his breath through the instrument part of the sound. Abrego answered with some truly heavy skronk from guitar. The set ended on a thunderous note, as the musicians tore down the music and put it back together again. It felt like reverence and resilience. It also felt like revolution.
