[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Jeremy Dutcher is an award-winning indigenous two-spirit song carrier, musician, and activist from Eastern Canada. Dutcher has just released a new album whose title can be interpreted as the people of great spiritual power. Let's listen to the first song off the album Motewolonuwok.

MUSIC - Dutcher: Motewolonuwok

Alison Stewart: In 2018, Jeremy Dutcher won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize as well as a Juno Award for his first album that featured archival wax cylinder recordings of tribal ancestors found in the Canadian Museum of his history. Dutcher sang along with them entirely in the indigenous language Wolastoqey. The new album features more personal themes and a blend of Dutcher's Indigenous language as well as the first song he's ever written in English. The new album is out now and joining me for a listening party is Jeremy Dutcher. Jeremy, hi.

Jeremy Dutcher: Hi, Alison. We're having a listening party.

Alison Stewart: We are having a listening party.

Jeremy Dutcher: Amazing.

Alison Stewart: Now I'm going to ask you to say the name of the album. I did my best but I want to hear you say it.

Jeremy Dutcher: You did, and it's so nice to hear. Honestly, I love that I get to put albums in our language and make journalists stumble over them and say them. No, it means a lot to have people just try, but you did well. How I would say it is Motewolonuwok.

Alison Stewart: Motewolonuwok.

Jeremy Dutcher: Yes, you got it. You got it. Then like you were saying, indicates to the people of great spiritual power which as a young indigenous person growing up, I looked around in my community and that's what I saw. I saw these amazing spiritual people that were doing a lot of really good work to protect our language, and to pass our songs forward, and all of this really cool stuff, so I just wanted to honor them with this next project that I was doing.

Alison Stewart: This is a project that you hope people will listen to holistically as an entity, as one thing. One thing to experience. How do you characterize the arc of the album? When you want people to experience that way, how do you go about creating it?

Jeremy Dutcher: I guess I always think about the arc and a story that one is trying to tell when building a record. I'm different in that way. I don't make singles or that kind of stuff much to the consternation of my record label. I like to create albums and tell stories. I hope people sit down and listen to the whole thing. There is a shift from Wolastoqey language, as you're pointing out, to English language. There's even a bilingual track on here so it has both in the choruses in both languages.

Think that for me, reflected both my lived reality of speaking both languages and them being part of my life, and also wanting to speak to a wider audience too and non-indigenous people. My first album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, it was all in Wolastoqey. I really did create it for the community and the people that were-- like you said, it was all based on the ancestor song. For me, it was a really direct purpose and focus to that project. This one may be less so and realizing that with that really specific goal, all of these non-indigenous people, non-holistic people, gathered around and had something to say, or wanted to listen to it.

It's like, well, speak to them in their language, let them know. That's what this record feels like. It took me a while to get into the swing of English singing it because it's a different voice and the ways that your mouth moves in different languages, you have to approach it differently.

Alison Stewart: You put together a 12-person choir to sing on some of the songs and before we listen to a piece, why did you want this sort of sound? Why did you want this to be part of this project?

Jeremy Dutcher: Well, it was essential right from the get-go that because a lot of what I'm trying to explore on this record is the importance of collectivity and community. In order to have a manifestation of that, the choir. I think about the music-making in my life. Whether it's in traditional indigenous contexts or in-- I studied classical music and so I sang in choirs and stuff and snging together always felt right. It always felt really beautiful and to have these shared songs feels really good.

When I was approaching this record and trying to expand the sound world for my last record, it felt like, "No get the choir, and don't just make it any choir, like build it of your people, build it of your friends." Not my people in a-- just my indigenous nation but--

Alison Stewart: Your people.

Jeremy Dutcher: My people, yes. From every circle of my life, man. That's what it was. We just pulled together all of these lovely humans that I'd sung with throughout my days and got to teach them my language a little bit. It just was this beautiful-- and now every time I listen to the record I get to hear my friends which feels like such a beautiful expression. Yes that choir, for me, it comes in on the record at a few points, but it always is this resounding chorus of support.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear one of those tracks. This is Together We Emerge.

MUSIC - Dutcher: Together We Emerge

Alison Stewart: That's the latest from Jeremy Dutcher. Jeremy, have you ever thought about scoring films?

Jeremy Dutcher: Oh, my gosh, yes. Just about every day.

Alison Stewart: I can hear it in that song.

Jeremy Dutcher: For me there's a cinematic and an episodic quality to the music that I write, and yes, I hope to do that. It's a matter of time and I'm really enjoying touring music. I just wrote a ballet last year as well, so trying to fit music into different formats. I can definitely see film scoring and composing as a future outlet. Right now I'm focused on doing the live shows and playing with my band, and that's been a lot of fun too. Yes, I love-- yes, I'm such a cinephile so I just feel like I want to marry the images with music really badly.

Alison Stewart: On that track, we can hear you play the grand piano. When were you first put in front of a piano?

Jeremy Dutcher: I guess it was really young. We didn't have a whole lot of money growing up but there was a family that donated a piano to our family, and yes, it really it meant a lot. I think it just sparked curiosity. It was around me but I never took lessons, and it was always just-- my brother was the one who took piano lessons and then he got proprietary about, "Oh, don't-- that's my piano." Sometimes I didn't always get a chance to play it until he left home.

Then when he went, I was about 17. I just started to sit down and play chords. From there, it just built into finding a musical language that made sense to me. Still to this day I haven't really taken-- piano's a huge part of my show but I've never really taken a lesson so I just found my own way through the instrument. Somebody told-- I had a pianist watch me play one time, and he says, "You play piano like a drummer," which makes sense for me because the drums was my first instrument. That was actually where I started my musical journey. Yes, I think I apply a lot of that rhythmic sensibility to the piano.

Alison Stewart: You have a new band on this album. How did you put the group together and what did you want to-- what did you get to explore with a new group of musicians around you?

Jeremy Dutcher: Oh, my God, this group. I'm so stunned by this group of musicians just because it's really different. With the first album, the last iteration of our tour, we were playing with orchestras. It was very much to the note. It has to be exact and accurate to what the score expects. Now I'm playing with free jazz players. It's still my music and I'm still leading at the piano, but these are improvisationlists, so they can take the music and offer their own things in the moment. The choices that they make are so next level. We're also playing with more musicians too. There's a bass player, there's a guitar player, a trumpeter, and a drummer, and so the sounds we get to make-- it's the rare occasion when I get to have the full orchestra and the full choir with me. Actually, we're going to do that in Toronto next month, so I can't wait.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's exciting. My guest is Jeremy Dutcher. The name of his new album is-- I'm going to try it. I'm going to give it a shot, Jeremy. Motewolonuwok, that was not very good.

Jeremy Dutcher: That's pretty close, Motewolonuwok. We're going to keep trying. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Motewolonuwok. We're going to get there.

Jeremy Dutcher: You got--

Alison Stewart: By the end of this, I'm going to get there. Let's talk about the song, The Land that Held Them that was inspired in part by Nina Simone.

Jeremy Dutcher: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What is it about Nina Simone that speaks to you?

Jeremy Dutcher: What isn't it about Nina Simone that speaks to me? Oh my gosh. A true artist of her time, of her community, and of the moment. I don't know. In so many ways. I don't even know where to begin, but in so many ways. Both through my political philosophy, but also my musical philosophy, she inspired me. Even just to say I'm not a jazz musician, I'm a Black classical pianist. That for me, just inspired so much like, oh, well what does Black-- sorry, what does indigenous classical music sound like? That for me was a real jumping-off point as to like, "Oh, you can create it as a young indigenous classical musician." That's whatever you make. That was like a freedom that I always credit to her that she gave me.

Most specifically about this song The Land that Held Them as They Died came from really sitting down and contending with a song like Mississippi Goddam. As I'm sure you and your listeners would be familiar, that song is such a history-telling and a truth-bearing of a moment. For me, there was, in the last couple years, some pretty high profile in the news, cases of young, very young, very, very young indigenous people being murdered, and they're not really getting justice at all. For me, what about Winnipeg Goddam, what about Quebec Goddam, what about-- oh, sorry, I realize I'm probably not supposed to be so--

Alison Stewart: It's not one of the bad ones, but you're saying within the artistic--

Jeremy Dutcher: We're talking about the art.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the art. We'll go there.

Jeremy Dutcher: [laughs] Anyway, so much to say that I wanted to memorialize these stories in a song the way that Nina did so beautifully in her song. I set out to take these headlines because that's what they get boiled into. These young people are people and they have families and they have stories. Now I'm very lucky that I've been able to go and do ceremony in some of these communities that these stories come from. It makes me want to go and sing these hard truths, and that's to the point of the album, what it's all about. We have a lot of hard stories coming out of our communities, indigenous communities from coast to coast to coast. Through that hardness is also a lot of resilience and beauty too. I think it matters where we point the camera and, and where we sing our energy to.

This one is definitely-- The Land that Held Them is definitely the hard thorn in the side of this record because it persists, and we need to be evaluating indigenous life right now. I really do believe that it's in our languages and in our philosophies that have a real potential to turn around the ecological disasters of this world and actually help us through this really difficult time. We need to be listening to indigenous voices and I guess that's what this song is about, is about memoralizing the hardness of this moment right now for a lot of our brothers and sisters. Yes, that's what this song's all about.

Alison Stewart: The Land that Held Them from Jeremy Dutcher.

MUSIC- Dutcher: The Land that Held Them

Alison Stewart: That is from Jeremy Dutcher's latest album. We're having a listening party. We could also have a looking at party, because if someone Googles you right now, they will see that you had a recent shoot in Vogue Magazine. [laughs].

Jeremy Dutcher: Oh, my goodness. I still can't believe that [laughs], but it did happen. It's on the internet for all to see now.

Alison Stewart: When you think about presentation, and you think about presentation as part of your art, how do you think about it?

Jeremy Dutcher: Hugely, I think for me, presenting, I guess, my work and myself even in a very considered way that is highly aesthetic and incorporates all and weaves together the pieces of me is important because I didn't see myself necessarily reflected in the media landscape when I was a young person coming up. Being an indigenous person, being a queer person, sitting at that intersection, I didn't have a lot of role models. What I realized, I think, pretty early in putting out music and holding space on stage is that how you live in the world matters, and how you reflect your own-- or express rather your own sense of self and your multiplicities, I think is really important to shine that for people.

Then it creates a little more space for the ones coming up. That for me is something I think about when I'm trying to put out images. The other thing too is also trying to support up-and-coming designers and people that are really doing cool work. Equally with the Vogue shoot, I got to highlight the work of an indigenous designer in Montreal named Caroline Monnet. She wove, together with her team, this beautiful big jacket with a cape and it's all woven together with recycled housing materials. She's talking about the housing crisis for a lot of indigenous people, not just up in the north, but all across the country.

Art with a message, I want to bring that forward, fashion that's rooted in our culture and building indigenous futurism regalia. What does that look like? What are our future ancestors going to be donning at the ceremonies? I'm interested by that, so it's fun. It's a fun little element of what I do. I'm a little bumpkin from small town East Coast Canada, and I never thought I would be in Vogue or being looked to as somebody who has a style point of view, but here we are. What a strange reality we inhabit.

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is-- I'm going to spell it and then I'm going to ask you to say it. M-O-T-E-W-O-L-O-N-U-W-O-K.

Jeremy Dutcher: Yes. See, now your listeners understand why it's a bit of a mouthful. These big long words, but there's a lot in there. Our words are long for a reason and they contain a lot of meaning. Anyway, how I say it is Motewolonuwok. Motewolonuwok.

Alison Stewart: I want people to hear it in its beauty, not me stumbling through it. Jeremy Dutcher has been my guest. Jeremy, thank you for the time today.

Jeremy Dutcher: Alison, it was such a pleasure. I hope we can do this anytime you want. You give me a call. I hope to be through New York sometime soon. We will see then.

Alison Stewart: Yes. We look forward to seeing you. This is All Of It. There is more after the news.

[music]

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