Mali Obomsawin (Deerlady)

During the last decade, Indigenous artists in North America have been telling their stories in profound new ways, engaging with experimental forms for traditional narratives and finding broader audiences for it. Mali Obomsawin, a member of Canada’s Abenaki people and now based in Maine, has been central not only to that movement but also to its limitless sense of possibility. A powerful bassist and audacious composer at the intersection of jazz and classical, Obomsawin first earned wider attention with 2022’s Sweet Tooth. A six-song suite rendered by a mighty sextet of horns, woodwinds, and a restless rhythm section, Sweet Tooth pulled apart Catholic hymns translated into Abenaki, put field recordings of elders beneath exploratory improvisation, and applied Albert Ayler-like liberation to chants of self-determination.

In the years since, Obomsawin has started a sharp duo, Deerlady, their defiant love songs suggesting the flinty Pacific Northwest indie rock of the mid-‘90s. And on 2024’s symbiont, a collaboration with Jake Blount, they combined bass and banjo with radical electronics to suggest new frameworks for Black and Indigenous futurism, or for reclaiming traditional ways of living to reimagine what’s next. Obomsawin has continued to play the music of Sweet Tooth, turning it into even fiercer free jazz for these fraught times. “There’s this idea that Indigenous people will never leave the 16th or 17th or 18th century, right? They see us in regalia,” as she once told NPR. “We’re saying things now.”