ANNOUNCING Mali Obomsawin - Sweet Tooth (OOYH 017)
ANNOUNCING Mali Obomsawin - Sweet Tooth (OOYH 017), out on digital + LP on October 28, 2022! We are so excited for this release, and can't wait to share this incredible debut recording by Mali, featuring Savannah Harris (drums, vocals), Miriam Elhajli (guitars, lead vocals) Allison Burik (reeds, vocals), Noah Campbell (reeds), and Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet, flugelhorn). You'll be hearing much more about this over the coming weeks, but for now enjoy this teaser of the opening track Odana, and maybe check out the pre-order...vinyl will be limited on this release, so grab them soon! Photography by Abby Lank and Jared Lank. Layout and design by TJ Huff (huffart.com).
PRE-ORDER: https://outofyourheadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sweet-tooth
About Sweet Tooth:
A suite for Indigenous resistance, the new album from Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter Mali Obomsawin flies in the face of Western tropes that insist Indigenous cultures are monolithic, trapped in time. Instead, Obomsawin highlights centuries of clever adaptation and resistance that have fueled the art and culture of Wabanaki people. Written as a compositional suite, the album Sweet Tooth, coming October 28, 2022 on Out of Your Head Records, blends Wabanaki stories and songs passed down in Obomsawin’s own family with tunes addressing contemporary Indigenous life, colonization, continuity, love and rage. It’s at once intimately personal, featuring field recordings of relatives at Odanak First Nation, but also conveys a larger story of the Wabanaki people, stretching across the domain of their confederacy from Eastern Canada to Southern New England. In three movements, Obomsawin’s powerful compositions honor the Indigenous ability to shape great art from the harshest fires of colonialism. The compositions reveal threads that bind together blues, jazz, hymns, folk songs, and Native cultures, and foreground the breadth and continuity of Indigenous contributions to these genres. “Telling Indigenous stories through the language of jazz is not a new phenomenon,” Obomsawin explains. “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.” Sweet Tooth is a celebration of Indigenous innovation, and an ingeniously envisioned debut for this composer-bandleader.