The double bass was the first sound, evergreen and lonely in the lowest register. But what soon followed in the Morse Recital Hall on the night of January 31, 2025, for part of the Ellington Jazz Series hosted by the Yale School of Music, was a thunderous performance from the Mali Obomsawin sextet. The hour-long setlist was a suite of resistance, spearheaded by bassist-bandleader Obomsawin of the Odanak First Nations, hailing from the Wabanaki reservation in Quebec and Maine.
No introduction suffices for Obomsawin’s work, which since childhood, has been unabashedly unfaithful to genre. Jazz critic Peter Margasak declares in The Quietus that Obomsawin’s work “seamlessly meld[s] chorale-like spiritual, folk melodies, and post-Albert Ayler free jazz.” But elsewhere, Obomsawin is deeply steeped in the folk scene, an involvement which they’ve said began from their childhood summers tucked away in the woods at the Maine Fiddle Camp playing traditional Québécois folk music. My entry point to Obomsomwin’s music, like many, was their duo with guitarist Magdalena Abrego, Deerlady, on account of the shoegaze band’s triple-feature on the soundtrack of the third season of Reservation Dogs. Obomsawin sometimes names their place within a more traditional sort of jazz genealogy, most often citing Ornette Coleman as their inspiration, but their work is more boundless than this configuration can reveal.
An eighteenth-century field recording of the Odanak storyteller, Theophile Panadis inaugurated “Pedegwajois,” the first released song that the sextet performed live and the fourth track of their debut album Sweet Tooth (2022). This performance was the portal to the universe of Obomsawin’s indigeneity, time-skipping and space-leaping back to their undergraduate years at Dartmouth College—and shouldering the heavy inheritance of being an Indigenous student implicated in a university established from colonialism. Founded in 1769 by Congressional minister (and Yale graduate) Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth was one of the first nine pre-Revolutionary, colonial charter schools established to proselytize Native Americans such as the Wabanaki. Over a century and a half later, Obomsawin studied composition (in addition to comparative literature and government), and conducted research in the university’s archives. There, they found the field recordings that conceived the first source material for the album.
Pinpointing genre, then, becomes an impossibility. Obomsawin’s free jazz is an anticolonial, political act. Syncopations aren’t merely breaks in the time signature, but interstices of history. As they finished “Pedegwajois,” Obomsawin tossed the melody line not only to the other big band players but to ancestors off-stage—by the end of the song it was difficult to say who they were really composing after.
At the Morse Recital Hall, Abrego took over for Mirian Elhajl, who played on the original album (recorded just a couple blocks away at New Haven’s own Firehouse 12). In the live performance, Abrego played electric guitar instead of Elhajl’s acoustic, layering her own sounds like the slap of her hand against her guitar’s shell. Obomsawin admitted the next morning, at a breakfast hosted by the Native American Cultural Center on February 1, that before shows, or during practice sessions, they tell Abrego of an image they want to hear—and entrusts her to paint the sonic landscape with the pedalboard.
Although Obomsawin’s name is obviously on the sleeve of their performance, in typical bassist-as-bandleader fashion, rendering their indigeneity legible is not in their politics. Rarely speaking to the audience between songs, they retained an insiderness, withholding all but one translation to song titles and lyrics. Prior to the formation of their sextet in 2021, Obomsawin was most known for their folk-rock trio Lula Wiles, which in its six-year stint produced three well-received recordings for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The trio’s breakup was precipitated, in part, by the lack of political stake in folk music and Obomsawin’s radical presence in politics. In the middle of the setlist, Obomsawin asked the crowd if anyone knew what the Anishinaabe word “ode’imin” meant, almost in a hush, as though they could anticipate the unresponsiveness from a Yale audience. Someone from the balcony, however, cut through the silence: strawberry.
The final songs of the night, “Blood Quantum (Nəwewəčəskawikαpáwihtawα),” another track off of Sweet Tooth, and “Medicine Song,” an unreleased song, test the asymptotes of cacophony. Right when percussionist Zach O’Farrill rolls down with brash cymbals in “Blood Quantum,” approximating surrender, reedists Allison Burik and Campbell, and trumpetist Adam O’Farrill, flatline the chaos with a three-part harmony. At the ten-minute mark, Obomsawin’s chant becomes the fourth part, and “Blood Quantum” reaches a climax: some of its final lyrics translate to I stand to face him, I face him defiantly, unflinchingly, I confront him.
It’s difficult to articulate Obomsawin’s music through language. It’s difficult to transliterate free jazz, without some compositional or improvisational margin of error. What I mean to say is that the thesis is in the conceit, Obomsawin’s compositions are already ahead of the language, autonomous, improvising constantly atop themselves. Mali Obomsawin is no longer here, but there. Any attempt to construct an image will be swept by Obomsawin’s next performance and will become a mixed metaphor; the fate of subversion is both beautiful and inevitable.
Halfway through “Medicine Song,” Abrego strummed and suddenly decided on a modulation, her foot on the pedal, and I’m unearthed from the recital hall. There, I’m sweating through the comforter of my younger sister’s bed at our dad’s house, in the casually cruel humidity of seasonless Hawai‘i. Obomsawin sings “There There” through my wired earbuds, as I pledge to fall asleep with her on the extra bed in her room, which once held someone who no longer lives with us.
Like my sister, I search for whatever the feeling is called for the presence in absence. I sweat through Obomsawin’s voice and its feverish estrangement, reminiscent of the Tommy Orange novel and Radiohead Hail to the Thief (2003) track “There There” lays claim to. Lush and haunting, they sing out another portal and universe: Making space for who we really are / despite this world will let me into you. My feet are overgrowth on the conjoining beds and dangle near her head while she’s sleeping, like an accident waiting to happen. I remember the difficulty of letting her fall asleep while I lay awake—did I dream that night? I chalked up this memory to the thunder over there.
