Tanya Tagaq.
Experimental vocalist and artist Tanya Tagaq dropped to her knees and began to crawl. Behind her, her band — Jesse Zubot on violin and electronics, Jean Martin on percussion, trumpet and electronics, and Christine Duncan on theremin and backing vocals — had whipped the music into a frenzy. Martin was pounding out a beat as heavy as a mountain, and Zubot and Duncan were piling on the layers of skronk. But it was Tagaq’s guttural voice that added the most weight, full of menace and anger. It was all she needed on Thursday night to set the College Street Music Hall stage on fire.
“We’re going to do an improvised set, which is exciting to me, because it’s never going to happen again,” Tagaq said before she started. But her musical language wasn’t jazz; it was traditional Inuit throat singing, which Tagaq, who is Inuit herself, explained was usually done by a pair of women, standing close together, facing one another (see an example of it here). This style of throat singing allowed for an astonishing range of sound, from growls and barks to percussive breaths to distorted two-tone singing to ghostly exhalations. It was a musical world to explore.
But Tagaq made no claims to being a traditionalist. “We don’t know where the music’s going to take us,” she said. “If you don’t like it, there are six exits.” Reports from previous concerts suggest that a few audience members have, in the past, taken advantage of that at some point in a Tanya Tagaq set. But in her prime time slot on Thursday night as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, it was clear that Tagaq had come to the right town.
Zubot began the set on violin with a plaintive, flute-like melody. Martin began with a small gong, then moved to the toms to fall into a beat. Zubot dropped his violin an octave or so to fill in the sound while Duncan created rising pitches with her voice and instrument. None of this was entirely ample preparation for Tagaq’s entrance, her voice swooping from breathy, almost childlike cooing to a brutal, raking howl in an instant. She took control of the rhythm. The band followed her lead.
The set only deepened as it progressed, with the band taking more and more risks, the payoffs for those risks getting bigger and bigger. Using all the prodigious vocal technique available to her, Tagaq laid down a series of tones and rhythms that was a call for the band to respond to. And they did. She and Duncan slid into a vocal-theremin duet that Martin and Zubot observed for several minutes before returning to the fray. When they returned, it was to create one of the heaviest rhythms this reporter has heard in a while. That was when Tagaq dropped to the floor, then rose to her feet again to enter a vocal territory that spoke of ecstasy and grief all at the same time. The music settled a little. This time Martin and Duncan dropped out for Tagaq and Zubot to create a duet of unearthly beauty, with notes layered upon whispered notes to create music of great tranquility.
That is, until Martin returned with a churning beat that Zubot, dropping his violin for drumsticks, and Tagaq added their own polyrhythms to. Duncan unleashed a caterwauling squall that Martin responded to with a small trumpet that he squeezed out strangled notes on while still playing the drums. The set perhaps hit its peak. It was scary and thrilling, transporting and time-stopping. The band wasn’t done, shifting fluidly from rhythm to rhythm and texture to texture, riding crests and falls in the music, until it was just Tagaq alone making sound, a final raspy rhythm to bring things to a close.
Despite Tagaq’s warnings, no one had walked out. Instead she got a standing ovation, and a round of applause that wouldn’t quit even after the band had left the stage, as if that was the sort of performance that could possibly have an encore. The band returned, obligingly, for a final bow, and finally the audience got the message: After a ranging, emotionally devastating performance like that, there was really nothing left to say.
