“This feels strange,” Inuit singer-songwriter Elisapie said near the midpoint of last Friday’s Decolonize the Chan concert. “It’s been a while.”
The crowd answered with cheers and applause.
By the time Elisapie began to talk, in a brief moment between songs, about her hopes that her music could play a small role in recovery after two long pandemic years, I was thoroughly convinced that she was right. When the concert began and everything but the floodlights behind her dimmed, I was considerably less certain; I only knew what my program had told me, and it didn’t have a tracklist. Despite the confidence that nominations for a JUNO and a Polaris provide, I could only guess at the contents of the concert itself. A review from NPR embedded in the program’s text declared it a synthesis between 70s rock and Indigenous folk music — what could that possibly sound like?
The first song of the evening was upbeat and driving, accompanied by a constant drumbeat and the promised guitar and bass melodies. The French lyrics floated over the instrumentation beautifully. I began to settle in, assuming that this might be what the rest of the evening would sound like. It was certainly what the program had promised, and if that was the only surprise in store, the remarkable vocal performance could comfortably carry the concert to its conclusion.
Less than a minute into the first song, Elisapie’s vocals dropped back to accommodate a moment of intentional discordance between her backing instruments, jolting the song out of the rhythm it had settled into and suggesting a disruption to the course of ordinary life. From here, the song leaned into a sense of controlled chaos, leveraging periodic interruptions to increase the emotion in the vocals as they dropped back in.
This varied style set the tone for the rest of the concert: no two songs sounded alike, and musical surprises were commonplace. During the next song an ethereal melody coming from a string instrument caught my ear, and glancing at the back of the stage I discovered that guitarist Joe Grass had pulled out a violin bow.
Without missing a beat, Elisapie’s music blends languages as easily as techniques; she sings in French, English and Inuktitut, often all in the same song.
Soon after Elisapie’s mention of the powerful effect of returning to the stage at the performance’s midpoint, the band launched into a cover of Willie Thrasher's “Wolves Don’t Live by the Rules.” Elisapie pointed the microphone towards the crowd during the song’s second chorus, inviting us to sing along, and we enthusiastically obliged. Before walking into it, I would have called the Chan Centre an unusual venue for an impromptu choral sing-along, but it suited the tone of the performance, making the audience active participants in the concert’s intentionally unusual staging.
From that moment onwards, the crowd was rarely seated, clapping along to the beat of each new song. The claps transitioned into thunderous applause at the close of the evening, and Elisapie promised a new project would be forthcoming; I suspect almost everyone in the concert hall that evening will find themselves curious enough to give it a listen when it arrives. If it can capture the odd, captivating feeling of listening to last Friday’s concert, it will certainly be worth it.