Canadian Musician - January / February 2020

Ajungi ᐊᔪᖏ AMPLIFYING THE ARTISTS OF NUNAVUT By Andrew King. Photos courtesy of Hitmakerz. “You are in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance.” The day after being awarded the 2018 Po- laris Music Prize for his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, Jeremy Dutcher sent out a tweet beginning with that phrase, and it remains pinned to the top of his page to this day. It’s a lofty claim, but one that’s easily supported with evidence in pretty much any direction you look. For music alone, consider that Dutch- er’s Polaris win in 2018 was the third for an Indigenous artist in five years, preceded by the innovative Tanya Tagaq in 2014 and the iconic Buffy Sainte-Marie the following year. Or consider the number of summer festival stages to be pummeled by the powwow-step of JUNO winners A Tribe Called Red in recent years. How about The Jerry Cans performing the super-hooky “Ukiuq” entirely in Inuktitut on the 2018 JUNOs broadcast? Of course, “Indigenous” isn’t a genre, nor are those who identify themselves as such a singular community. And while the vibrancy and visibility of these various music scenes feel fresh and exciting, this level of talent is nothing new. To borrow an apt metaphor, these aforementioned acts and their peers being deservedly awarded and acclaimed are the tip of an iceberg; beneath the waterline hides a massive chunk of ice that dwarfs the small fragment visible above. It’s the talent just below the surface that the team at Hitmakerz, an Iqaluit- based record label, has been working to augment, empower, and amplify with Ajungi. Ajungi (pronounced AH-YUNG-EE) is a music collective comprised of emerging artists all across Nunavut. It’s also the name of a compilation album released in 44 CANADIAN MUSICIAN An Ajungi/Hitmakerz songwriting workshop in Clyde River, NU. late November 2019 that showcases 19 of those artists on its 12 diverse tracks. The goal is simple: “to help launch and develop musical careers for talented Nunavummiut and share their music with the world.” How they go about that is a bit more complex. Since 2015, artist and entrepreneur Thor Simonsen and, a year later, his col- laborators at Hitmakerz have spearheaded the initiative, delivering songwriting and production workshops to remote commu- nities throughout Nunavut and helping artists produce, record, and release their work. To date, they’ve travelled to and engaged with 12 communities; in 2020, they’ll do another dozen. “It’s sort of a two-fold purpose. We want to strengthen the culture and lan- guage of Inuktitut and also give some tools to the young people there to be able to create music of their own,” shares Simon- sen. “There’s not a big musical infrastruc- ture in Nunavut right now, but there’s a ton of talent, so what we’ve been doing is trying to find that talent and develop it to a professional level.” While Simonsen’s family is Scandina- vian, his step-father was Inuk, and together, they moved to Iqaluit when he was seven. He started writing songs in his teens and shortly thereafter began producing his own music and that of his friends. “All through my life, I was able to see this big cultural difference between Inuit culture and Western, Canadian, and Euro- pean culture,” he shares. “I found [producing and collaborating on music] was a really good way to bridge that cultural gap – especially when we started taking different artists and different languages and mixing it all together.” The Ajungi album, he says, is an em- bodiment and an extension of that work. “The album really stems from work- shops that we do in the communities,” he says, noting that when it came to selecting songs: “We cast a wide net and were open to anything; we just wanted to see what Nunavummiut artists wanted to bring for- ward and what they had to share.” Simonsen explains that, owing to the territory’s geography and the fact that

Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 44