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full body image of musician Mali Obomsawin with long dark hair standing with an upright bass

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Music Performance | 7:30pm |  UNT Union Syndicate
No Tickets Required

Mali Obomsawin is a Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter who creates music that flies in the face of Western tropes insisting 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. Raised on ancestral land in central Maine and in Québec on the Odanak First Nations Reserve, Mali Obomsawin is used to living between linguistic and political borders, but also recognizes the absurdity of such dichotomies. When studying jazz at Dartmouth College (founded as an Indian school in 1769 to educate Wabanaki people) with cornetist and co-producer Taylor Ho Bynum, Obomsawin came to find that the voices of their actual ancestors languished in the archives of the college: field recordings of Odanak's songs and stories kept locked away. As Obomsawin became a masterful bassist and immersed themselves in the tradition's history, they came to learn that many jazz greats themselves were Native, and indeed many of the core principles of American music, like the four on the floor beat or the swing of the drum, were influences by Indigenous musical ideas. Mali Obomsawin tells stories celebrating the many Indigenous musical artists who came before, who faced an unrelenting system and prevailed by crafting new ideas into new expressions of themselves.