Mali Obomsawin stands at the forefront of contemporary Indigenous music, embodying a diverse range of genres that include jazz, roots music, and experimental sound. As a bassist, composer, and vocalist hailing from the Odanak First Nation, her artistic journey has led her to collaborate with esteemed musicians while forging her own path through innovative compositions that challenge the status quo. In this dialogue, we explore the nuanced influences that have shaped Mali’s musical identity, spanning her rich upbringing in rural western Maine, where folk traditions intermingle with political activism. We explore her recent endeavors, including her eponymous free jazz ensemble and the rock band Dear Lady, emphasizing her commitment to authenticity and artistic evolution. Join us as we engage with Mali’s insights on the vital interplay between creative practice and personal well-being, illuminating the profound impact of Indigenous culture on her work.

Takeaways:

• The podcast showcases the significant contributions of indigenous artists and creators, highlighting their impact on community culture.
• Mali Obomsawin, a versatile bassist and composer, embodies modern indigenous artistry through her eclectic musical styles.
• The importance of personal experiences and environments in shaping an artist's creative journey was emphasized throughout the discussion.
• The conversation touched upon the challenges faced by artists regarding wellness and the need for time to reflect and engage with their creative practices.

Links referenced in this episode:

• https://www.maliobomsawin.com/
• https://mali-obomsawin.bandcamp.com/album/greatest-hits
• https://elevenwarriorarts.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Dear Lady
• Julia Keefe
• Louis Armstrong
• Ella Fitzgerald
• Buena Vista Social Club
• Arabic Groove
• New England Conservatory
• Berkeley College of Music
• Dartmouth College
• Bren Puppet Theater

Mentioned in this episode:

Check out https://www.artoftherural.org/ for more information on the work of Art of the Rural.

Hello and welcome again to another episode of five Playing Questions, a podcast that proposes five questions to indigenous artists, creators, musicians, writers, movers and shakers, and culture bears, people in the community that are doing great things for their communities.

I'm Joe Williams, your host for this conversation.

My goal is to showcase these amazing people in our indigenous communities from around the region and country.

I want to introduce you to Molly Obamsiwin.

Molly Obamsiwin is a bassist, composer, vocalist and citizen of the Obanac First Nation.

Obonsewin's increasingly broad body of work spans jazz and roots music, indie rock and experimental sound.

An international touring artist and celebrated component, her current projects include her eponym free jazz ensemble, the rock band Dear lady, and Julia Keefe.

Indigenous big band.

Obam Soon's expansive practice models 21st century indigenity challenging the complacency of our times with lush, bombastic, and at times haunting compositions.

Molly has been blessed to study and perform with notable musicians including Espinosa Spalding, Rava Chacon, Taylor Ho, Byron, Dave Holland, Angelica Sanchez, and many, many more.

So with that said, let's jump into this convers with Molly Obonsomi.

Molly, thank you so much for joining me on five Plane Questions.

It's really great to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

Would you be able to introduce yourself.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from and what your background is?

Yeah.

Kwame Seaweet, Aloisi Maliake Bromswain, Luigi Odenak, Elsa Gundog.

I said, good morning, everybody.

My name is Molly Obamsuin.

I am from Odenak, the Abenaki First Nation on the El Segundok river, which is known by some as the St. Francis River.

And what is it creatively?

What is it that you do?

I am a bassist, I'm a singer.

I'm a composer.

I lead several projects, including a jazz sextet and a rock band called Dear Lady.

I also am part of the indigenous big band led by Julia Keefe.

Score films?

Yeah, I do a lot of stuff, but I'm a bassist first and foremost.

That is so cool.

That is so cool.

And the jazz quartet.

I've been listening to some of your tracks recently and just getting lost in them for the listener.

You have to check it out, but we'll.

We'll get into that later on.

So in.

Throughout our life, we're influenced by.

By different sorts of people and different environments.

What.

What are your biggest influences?

Wow.

A few.

A few.

I. I think my biggest influence was the environment.

I Grew up in musically in my hometown in rural western Maine.

It's a part of the world that people don't know a lot about.

It's a really interesting and complicated history of colonization and settlement and cultural sort of crossfading because it's sort of in the borderlands between some regions that were fought over for a really long time, but by several different entities.

So growing up there, I was surrounded by all these folk music traditions that kind of just like nestle in the foothills of the mountains there.

Cape Breton tunes coming down from Nova Scotia, Cape Breton area, Quebecois fiddle playing, Acadian tunes, old time tunes that come up.

The Appalachian Trail, which ends in Maine and ragtime is still played there.

There's sea shanties that people sing in in the area around Farmington, Maine where I grew up.

So that was like a very, very huge influence on me.

And then of course, being in community and hearing our folk songs are the Abenaki songs, the Wabanaki songs that we sing.

Big influence.

I guess I. Interpreting that question as a musical creative question.

But I also grew up with a lot of political activism in my family and in my life.

So like non musically and I. I grew up in a.

A barn that.

For a while at least that was when we.

When we moved to Maine, I was five years old.

And we basically squatted in this barn that was used as storage by the Bren Puppet Theater, which was like a political theater organization that got its start in the 60s.

Anti war activism.

And that was kind of like the community that I grew up in.

This sort of like anti war, anti imperialist organizing space.

And that barn had all these like huge paper mache sort of like props that were used in the big parades.

You might have seen those pictures.

And I think that growing up in that environment was also very influential on me.

I think you've just described the most magical growing up experience of all the guests that I've talked to.

It sounds almost whimsical in the sense, you know, in this.

What a space there.

Yeah, whimsical, but also severe.

Like it's very strange sort of.

Yeah, contrast there, I guess.

I imagine.

I imagine.

Sort of a follow up question to this and your introduction, music wise, what was the first album or the CD or download, what was your first one that really stood out for you, that really grabbed you musically?

I love them.

There are three that come to mind.

I won't go too deeply into them, but my family actually my dad's a musician and I grew up going to his concerts.

His gay he played a lot of, like, bar gigs, you know, bar and grill.

And so I heard him playing a lot, but we didn't have, other than that, like, a ton of music playing in the house that I remember, I think probably just because of, like, limitations of electricity, honestly, in.

When we were living in the barn.

But I remember hearing the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald duo record playing a lot, so there's a lot of duets.

I remember Buena Vista Social Club was like, a classic that my dad and mom always had on.

And then there was this.

My mom's kind of this, like, hippie.

Like, she's like a Jewish lady from New York, and she.

I don't know if you've been to a lot of these, like, sort of, like, New England, like, hippie stores.

They usually have, like, a CD rack with, like, these very generic sort of, like, ethnic records on them.

And she picked up this record called Arabic Groove, which, like, I really loved as a kid.

So.

So those are the three that come to mind.

That's.

That's incredible.

Yeah, no, that's.

That's great.

So what.

How did your.

Yeah.

How did your.

Your music career develop?

Often I pose this question to artists on their careers, developing a college and post college.

How.

How was that journey for you?

Because I imagine maybe your music.

I won't say career, but your.

Your.

And maybe career is the right word.

Probably started well before you were 18.

Yeah, I think so.

So in Western Maine, with this robust fiddling tradition, there's this fiddle camp that happens every year.

It's.

It's, like, so dorky, but it was like.

It was my life starting when I was, like, 12 and throughout the rest of high middle school and high school.

And you.

It's intergenerational.

There's all these different fiddle styles that I described, and you get to meet people and learn from people who are professionals, who just do it in their kitchens, you know, at home, who, like, teach in schools, who tour.

And I think that's, like, when I really saw the path that I could take and ended up taking in terms of a career, but really, like, learned that music was an entire.

There's, like, this entire network and, like, matrix of, like, musical worlds that existed that I wanted to be a part of and explore here.

So I was, like, 11 or 12 when I started going there.

And.

And how did that progress then over time, as.

As you've gotten older?

Yeah, there was a lot of folks who were there who ended up going to study in Boston at various music schools.

New England Conservatory, Berkeley, College of Music Emerson.

Like, just, you know, so many colleges in Boston and there's a strong traditional music scene in Boston because of.

Yeah, because of the main connection, because of everything.

And so I met those folks.

I saw that I wanted to be a part of that.

And I ended up also going to this jazz camp that was like quite obscure jazz world that also happened to be in Farmington.

It was like an avant garde jazz camp.

I started going to that when I was 14.

And that also had a strong Boston connection.

So right after I graduated high school and even before I graduated, I was making trips to Boston to meet people and play and then ended up starting a folk band that sort of crystallized in Boston.

And by the.

I was only living and studying in Boston for a year before going to Dartmouth College, where I was able to go with on scholarship and everything.

It was great.

But I, like, I basically spent every weekend of college away from Dartmouth just going back to Boston playing and gigging and touring.

So.

Yeah.

And oftentimes opportunities will present themselves, especially during that.

That period.

How.

How did those present themselves to you?

And.

Yeah, could you talk us through some of those experiences?

Yeah, well, the band that I formed, it's funny, it's like such a distant part of my life now, but they were called Lula Wild.

It's like very folk, like with these two nice white girls from Maine.

And.

But, you know, I got like.

I was really into it and we.

We ended up getting invited to play at a lot of festivals and like, teach at a lot of camps.

And it was really, really similar to how we all grew up.

I met them at Fiddle.

So the festival, folk festival with a week of teaching attached to it was something that we ended up just doing all summer.

And then we would book our own shows and so we would book them around my school schedule and their school schedule when they were in school too.

I was the youngest.

Yeah.

So I guess it kind of just snowballs after a minute.

Yeah.

Since that time, too.

What's going on now?

What are you.

How do I pose this question?

Sorry, I'm sort of off my regular script here.

Yeah.

Can you talk to me about what's going on right now, both in the studio and of course you're performing right now.

I think before we started recording, you had a performance last night and then you came back to and graciously met up with, with me this morning to have this conversation.

So.

Yeah.

What's going on right now?

Just.

Yeah, three 12 years ago.

Time is so strange, and it kind of just like, turned into this huge thing, and I feel like I've been touring nonstop for three years.

I'm so exhausted, and, I don't know, my career really took off, and I got a manager, got a booking agent, like, toured a bunch.

And it's kind of a machine.

And you, after a while, kind of realize that you are just like a gadget in that machine.

Like, you're just like, kind of like one of the bolts, and you're the most important bolt, but, like, you're just a bolt.

And it's actually, like, pretty, like, dehumanizing after a while because, like, when do you rest?

So I, like, just finished what feels like three years on the road, and now I'm home and reconnecting with my practice and, like, remembering how to be a full human, not just a bolt.

It's really awesome.

I'm, like, I'm reading.

I'm returning to my creative practice, which is, like, you know, this beautiful combination of, like, fiction and poetry and theory, political theory, and obviously practicing bass and, like, listening to music, smoking weed.

Like, I'm just, like, remembering how to, like, do what I do.

That's what I'm doing right now.

As someone who has a creative practice themselves, it's.

It's quite difficult sometimes to find time for yourself to do the work that you do that just sort of feeds your own soul.

How.

And I imagine it's probably not impossible for.

For a short while now for you with.

With what's been going on, but how important is it for you to be able to.

To make time for yourself, to.

To just do something for yourself and.

And to sort of return to your own center?

It's vital.

But it's also like.

I think it was Tasba Chavez was, like, on this panel at.

On Sundance last year, and she was just like, you know, when we're working, wellness is, like, the first thing that we sacrifice, especially as.

As women.

Like, we're just like, oh, yeah, wellness.

What's that?

Like, I'll eat a McDonald's burger because, like, I just don't have time, you know, and whatever.

And, like, with, like, wellness is one thing, you know, like, making sure our bodies are healthy.

But for, like, being a creator of art, like, the.

This time of, like, quietness and stillness and, like, you know, engaging with, like, any feelings of depression or feelings at all, like, that's actually what the art comes from.

So, like, I feel like I've like, actually by like getting rid of like this.

This solitude and this slowness.

I've like gotten rid of my creative practice altogether.

And so.

So it's like absolutely critical.

Like, I don't know, people are like, well, what's going to happen with your next record?

Like, when's that coming?

And I'm like, if I had been.

If I had made myself less available to the public by touring so constantly, like, there would be a next record right now.

You know, it's such a strange thing, formula to try to figure out.

This reminds me of a conversation I've had with.

With another guest on the show where when they do get back into their studio to create, sometimes they.

They block out the world and then they're stuck in their studio for.

Not stuck.

They.

They're isolated in their studio for months at a time creating.

And of course they.

They get back in their head.

You know, they sort of get back in those old routines that sort of.

That.

That generates that creative process.

But then they come out of it not having human contact for months or weeks, and they.

They don't know how to interact with people.

They get kind of strange again.

And I imagine maybe now that you're off the road and you're back in your space, maybe that.

That the elements that create that for that creative process will.

Will begin again for you.

I hope so.

And I feel like.

Like I'm always strange.

I don't know, I'm like, oh, God, the idea of, like, getting more strange is so terrifying.

But.

But yeah, you know, it's.

It's such a strange balance because it's like you go out into the world and you engage with people and you're like gathering in all these ways, gathering experiences, gathering thoughts and theories and everything that you don't quite realize that you're gathering until you take that solitary time.

And.

But I felt, you know, I'm excited to see that those experiences kind of trickle out because I haven't had any time to reflect on them enough to know if I've even.

If I even have anything to write about right now.

I'm sure I do, but I think we all kind of get to that point as artists where we're like, do I even have anything to say?

Like, have I lost it?

Like, where's that thing?

Is it going to come to me?

Or have I lost it?

That I just.

I listen to interviews of musicians in their 70s and 80s and they.

I think they still feel that even though they're, you know, they've been Doing this their entire life and.

Yeah.

But as soon as they.

They get rolling again, it all comes in and it all just lines up.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Peace and famine.

Yeah, Perfect.

Yeah, perfect.

So what would you say to the.

The 18 to 22 year old that's listening to this conversation?

I. Yeah.

You know, I think the most powerful thing that you can do is if you're into something, if you like something, if you feel drawn towards something, just like, keep going deeper into it, keep going closer towards it and following it, and don't be distracted by the idea that you should do something else.

You should be, you know, able to do something else or should be on a different track because, you know, society wants you to, you know, have like, financial stability or, like, I don't know, I feel like for folks who, like, grew up in situations of, like, instability, you know, financial or otherwise, it's a lot easier for us to be like, well, we made it work, so, like, why should I go and get a 9 to 5 and like, try to chase down a salary or something?

But.

But for others, you know, maybe that matters more and maybe, maybe.

And I know that sometimes, like, growing up in instability makes you more inclined to, like, get rid of your dreams and just chase stability and predictability, I guess.

But yeah, my advice is just like, if you want to believe that you can do it, you should believe it and you should go and chase it and don't distract it.

Yeah.

Heck, yeah.

So what's.

What's next for you?

What's.

What's on the horizon for you?

This year is so exciting because it's just this vast expanse of time to write and, and figure out the answer to that question.

And like, I. I know, you know, I can.

I can tell you Dear lady is writing.

We're getting together a lot to write more music and figure out what that sound is going to be.

I just did some recording with my, my sextet.

We'll see what happens with those.

I'm trying to figure out what it is for me next.

You know, I think it's so easy for artists to, like, get caught up on what they did once that was successful and try to recreate that.

And I'm not really interested in that.

You know, I'm.

I'm just like, I'm just trying to grow and see what that looks like and sounds like.

So that's what's next.

With the sextet.

Was that.

Did you all perform Lineage?

Yeah, that is.

Lineage is.

Is something that has been on repeat.

For me right now.

I.

It's it's an amazing, amazing piece.

Thank you so much.

That means a lot.

That's.

Yeah.

That was, like the.

Maybe the first totally original song that I wrote.

Composition that I wrote.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Out the gate.

Out the gate.

That was it.

I have this.

Oh, I forgot.

I don't want to misstate what it is, but for me, it was just this.

This intertwining arrangement in my head that I could just see and just.

Just go with when I was.

When I listened to it.

And.

Yeah, that.

And your other pieces are just amazing.

So.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

So, speaking of which, where can the listener connect with your music or find you on social media?

Yeah, well, social media.

You know, I hate to say it, but I'm still on there.

Okay.

On Instagram, @mollyobau.

Easy to find if you can spell my name.

And also at Dear Ladyband and you can find my music.

You know, the best place to look for it and to buy it is on Bandcamp.

So you can find me there.

And that's all my projects are on there, connected to my page.

You can find Dear Lady.

You can find the smaller things that I put out without a label, which is fun and sort of like a little Easter egg for folks who are really interested in the process and the.

Yeah.

What happens between the big productions.

Right on.

We'll put link in the show notes for the listener to find.

So thank you.

Yeah.

Well, is there any last thoughts you'd like to leave with us before we close out?

No, just Kchila Uni for having me.

It's been great talking to you, Joe.

This was an honor.

Thank you so much for taking time, especially after late night last night and this early morning conversation.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

And that does it for this episode of five Playing Questions.

I want to thank Molly again for her time and sharing her story with us.

This conversation happens happened early in the morning, and she had just returned the late night before from her last tour date.

She had every opportunity to reschedule, but she didn't.

And as you can hear, she was amazing.

I feel Molly is about to really, really blow up, and I'm so honored that we had this conversation with her and for you to be able to connect with her.

So please check out her website@mollyobamsuin.com and follow her on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream.

As well as YouTube.

Her website also has tour dates, so please, absolutely go check her out in person.

I want to thank you for joining us and spending your time listening to what I feel is a very important story and perspective from our community.

Please join us next time as we speak with another incredible person.

I'm Joe Williams.

Thank you for listening to five Plane Questions.

Your support helps keep these conversations going.

You can follow us on Threads, Instagram, TikTok and Blue Sky.

And to stay connected, visit us at our website 11warriorarts.com to explore past episodes, check out our exclusive merch and sign up for our upcoming newsletter.

Every listen, share and purchase helps support this podcast.

Support for this podcast comes from Art of the Rural working to advance rural culture through equity and collaboration, media and the arts.

Our episodes are produced, produced and edited by POD For Good.

Jesse and the team worked tirelessly to create the high quality episodes you're listening to right now.

Removing all of my ums and quirks mostly.

Well that does it.

Take care and I'll see you next time.

This has been an eleven Warrior Arts production.