Mali Obomsawin: "No one needed to hear another indie record, but we wanted to put it out, and we got this very surprising, huge response to it"

“It’s been dizzying, to be honest,” chuckles Mali Obomsawin about the prolific year she’s been having. She’s about to perform with Jake Blount at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and she confides that her year is not over yet. “By the end of 2024,” she continues, “there will have been a fourth piece of music recorded by me!”

Her performance with Blount was related to one of those pieces of music, symbiont, released by Smithsonian Folkways. A collaboration with Blount, it included new takes on songs and hymns from the American South and was featuring in the Kennedy Center programme alongside traditional songs from the Indigenous Abenaki Nation in New England and southern Canada, to which Obomsawin’s family belongs. 

Her first album of the year, Deerlady, released by Out of Your Head Records, paired Obomsawin – a songwriter, bass player and vocalist – with Chicago-based guitarist Magdalena Abrego. “No one needed to hear another indie record,” says Obomsawin, “But we wanted to put it out, and we got this very surprising, huge response to it. I was empowered to bring the world to see the philosophical and sonic context for the stories I’d be telling.” In June, Obomsawin and Abrego were joined by Montreal-based reed player Allison Burik for Live Sketches, an EP featuring live performances of material from Obomsawin’s acclaimed 2022 debut studio album, Sweet Tooth, which melded Indigenous songs and chants with progressive jazz voicings and improvisation. 

Her final release of the year is a soundtrack, recorded with Abrego and Burik, for the 2024 award-winning documentary film Sugarcane, about the “resilience of Indigenous communities in the face of the [mandatory] residential school system” in the Canadian province of British Columbia. “We needed Gothic Western Country music, and I incorporated a lot of free improvisation and noise into the score,” said Obomsawin. “And one of the directors, Julian Brave NoiseCat [from the Sushwap tribe], gave me permission to play off some of his traditional music. I want to keep writing the music that I hear.”