“artfully use powwow vocals as a counterpoint to melody-driven arrangements… their power is commanding” – Guardian
Unbound, Bizhiki’s 2024 album, opens with a single, trembling chord that rises and descends before meeting a warm, beguiling voice. This voice sings in a tradition that people have heard in this northern river country for millennia. The music that follows is a soulful dialogue between the ancient tradition of powwow singing and a contemporary musical palette. On Unbound, Bizhiki entwines the powwow style with synthesized voice modulation, and accents hand drumming with electronic samples and beats. The harmonies and resonances on this album are equal parts cultural and musical.
Many of the songs on this album go back to when the spirit of the Bizhiki was forged, over a decade ago, on the banks of Wisconsin’s Chippewa River. Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, one of the two principal Native voices on the album, remembers getting an invitation to play the Eaux Claires festival in 2015. “I was driving up in Cornucopia, Wisconsin — way out in the middle of nowhere —and I got a call.” There was a festival on the Ojibwe’s ancestral homelands, and the organizers wouldn’t feel right without the involvement of the land’s native communities. “I agreed,” he remembers. “And I told them I wished more people thought like this. That they would say ‘we’re gonna give your people space and just invite you to do what you wanna do.’”
Bizhiki’s Unbound is a collaboration between a group of singers and musicians at a particular time and place. All of them look to help by exchanging ideas in an open-ended dialogue. Bizhikiins Jennings says there’s a lesson here for himself and his new group. “Just like in life, we’re learning and we’re maturing, and we’re becoming who we are.”
Recommended for fans of Bon Iver, Keith Secola, Jeremy Dutcher and Northern Cree.
