Tanya Tagaq Gillis

Usually, and as a Rule I keep this Blog to Jazz music. I listen to all kinds of music and I believe that boxing everything and chosing your favorite box and sticking to that is a little limiting, keeping you from the wonders of what the contents of the rest of the boxes may contain.

Tanya Tagaq Gillis is one of those wonders. She is classfied as a pop singer (I can’t figure out why) because her music is so much more interesting than mere pop music. Growth, from her new CD Auk/Blood is one of my favorites.

She uses a technique that is origionally Inuit, called throat singing which is

Few musical traditions are more peculiar and compelling than the katajjaq throat singing of the Inuit, a 25,000-strong native population concentrated in Canada’s Nunavut territory. It’s as much a game as a form of music: pairs of women face and embrace one another, unleashing a wild torrent of grunts, exhalations, inhalations, and all manner of guttural, rumbling low-end noises. Each woman rapidly follows her partner, so that their streams of sounds are almost like fun-house reflections of each other–this is made easier, one presumes, because the singers hold their faces so close together that they can use each other’s mouths as harmonic resonators. A “song” ends when one of the women is reduced to laughter or simply runs out of breath.

As Peter From Post No Bills explains it.

Although it is a kind of a duet, Tanya developed this as a solo technique, but loves collaborating with other artists, Bjork is among those.

Jazz at its finest if different from other forms of music due to the freshness and play involved in improvising - Listen to this and you will find much of those qualities in there.

This is not music that you can leave on as a background. It demands your full attention, and should get it.