COVER

JAZZ FEST Snotty Nose Rez Kids make their politics personal

by Mike Usinger

If there’s been an upside to being stuck at home for the past year, it’s that Snotty Nose Rez Kids have kept busy. Haisla rappers Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce have pretty much completed a follow-up to 2019’s TRAPLINE—a culture-shifting triumph centred on the importance of respect: for the environment, for women, and for the history of Indigenous people in Canada.

While there’s no title yet for the new record, there’s definitely a through-line connecting the songs. From the 2017 albums Snotty Nose Rez Kids and The Average Savage to TRAPLINE, Snotty Nose Rez Kids have tended to focus on the political. That’s continued with singles released during lockdown—the deliriously woozy “Something Else” was inspired by CNN labelling North America’s Indigenous people as, well, “something else” during the last U.S. election.

“The Average Savage, self-titled record, and TRAPLINE were all so politically charged,” Metz notes. “With this one, there’s still some of that in there, but it’s not all political. We just felt like it was time for us to tell our story—the raw realities that we grew up with. For me, personally, growing up I was surrounded by alcohol abuse and drug addiction.

“When I was growing up, surrounded by that environment, music was what I turned to,” he continues. “That made me feel like I wasn’t alone. The way that we’re looking at it, is ‘Yo, the way we’re feeling, or the way we felt, we can promise and guarantee there’s some other young ’un out there who is going through the same thing, if not worse.’ So they could use a big bro. And that’s what this record is going to be.”

GROWING UP IN NORTHWESTERN British Columbia’s Kitamaat Village, Metz and Nyce oved hip-hop on all levels. But they didn’t finish high school with the goal of starting Snotty Nose Rez Kids.

“My parents adopted a lot of kids when I was growing up, so we had a lot of kids coming in and out of the house,” Nyce says. “My dad always made sure there was food on the table, and that he could provide for his family. That was, to him, his job.”

His proudly blue-collar father did that job well. That instilled in Nyce the importance of self-sufficiency, stability, and hard work.

“He wanted me to take a trade,” he says. “But that wasn’t my thing, so I went to business school for two years. I wanted to start a clothing company, and still do.”

After leaving school, Nyce did service work up north for companies like Ledcor.

“Then I realized I wanted to be a rapper,” he says with a laugh. “Funnily enough, they were really supportive when I made that decision. My dad just wanted to make sure that I had a backup plan.”

Metz’s mom was briefly less than thrilled when her son announced that he was leaving university—where he was studying accounting—to go into music.

“I remember,” he says, “telling her ‘Mom—I’m not happy, and I can’t see myself doing this, sitting at a desk and counting numbers all day the rest of my life until I’m grey-haired. But I really love this music, and I want to pursue that.’”

Metz eventually moved to Vancouver in the fall of 2015 to study music, reconnecting with Nyce, who’d landed in the Lower Mainland the previous year.

“We formed SNRK a year after I moved down,” Metz says. “We’d already made music together in the past, but we weren’t SNRK yet. Q was basically the only friend that I had, let alone the only artist that I knew, down here. We had a mixtape, started going to open-mic sessions, and people really started to love it. The crowds got bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where it was like ‘Man, let’s do an album.’ And the rest is history.”

ASKED WHY SNOTTY Nose Rez Kids connected with audiences right off the starting line, Metz offers this: “For a lot of people, it was something that they’d never really heard before. When you think of hip-hop around 2016 and ’17, what we were doing was really different. Not only that, but we were Indigenous. And we were starting to tell our story after years of being silenced. I think that was the biggest thing.”

Indeed, rather than rapping about Gucci loafers and bongs the size of Stonehenge, Snotty Nose Rez Kids quickly established themselves as a group determined to shred all mainstream perceptions of what it means to be Indigenous.

“At the end of the day, we just wanted to tell our story, whether it was what we’ve gone through personally, what our parents went through, or what our grandparents went through,” Metz says. “We can only speak from our story, and our family, and that’s all we ever wanted to do. We just wanted to let the young ’uns out know ‘you’re beautiful, you’re worthy, and you’re a shining light in this world.’ Because a lot of us grew up with self-hatred.

“And a lot of that had to do with stereotypes the media would display us in,” he continues. “You see movies like fucking Pocahontas or Peter Pan and, to young kids, that gets engraved in their mind. Non-Indigenous folks will think ‘Oh, yeah—savages!’ It all becomes normalized.”

BOTH MUSICIANS describe Snotty Nose Rez Kids as part of an ongoing journey— one where they both continue to grow, and heal.

Nyce reveals he lost a brother, who took his own life about a decade ago. “The first album we wrote was a healing tool for us,” he says. “It gave us space to talk about what happened, and why it happened.”

Some of the journey is marked by artistic achievements, with Nyce praising Metz for handling most of the production duties on the upcoming full-length.

But perhaps more importantly, Snotty Nose Rez Kids have positioned themselves as hugely important voices teaching a new generation of Indigenous kids to be proud of where they come from.

“When I first moved to Vancouver,” Metz remembers, “I had a clean, buzzcut fade. And that’s when I decided to grow my hair. That was, shit, 2015—going on six years now. As we started to grow and move along with SNRK, my hair slowly but surely just started getting longer. And longer, and longer. Each time my hair would get a bit longer, my lyrics would start to change. When I had a buzzcut I was on some partying bullshit. As I started to grow my hair and find myself, you started to hear the activist come out and the storyteller come out—the voice of my ancestors come out. And it’s been a journey and a half, man.”

The pandemic break was tough.

“I went through some dark times this past year,” Nyce acknowledges. “We were at a point in our career where we felt like we were at a peak: there was an American tour, and the feeling that we were finally going to start making some real money and have experiences we’ve never had before. Then it all got derailed due to COVID.

“I’m an extrovert who lives through experience, and who writes through experiences—a night out, or being on the road. So for me it was really hard to find my creative fire, or the spark that ignited my flame. For the first six months I had writer’s block.”

To get out of it, Nyce eventually realized he needed to simply put his head down and started working.

As we return to normalcy, there’s no shortage of work still to be done for Snotty Nose Rez Kids. “We just want to do our part,” Metz says. “And if it comes down to exposing the harsh truths of what we’ve been through, so be it.” g

After going the political route with their previous releases, Haisla Nation rappers Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce have decided to get personal. Photo by Matt Barnes.

Each time my hair would get a bit longer, my lyrics would start to change.

– Darren “Young D” Metz

Snotty Nose Rez Kids play Performance Works on June 25 as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

JAZZ FEST Sung celebrates jazz music’s High Priest of Bebop

by Ken Eisner

For a relatively recent convert to improvised music, New York–based pianist Helen Sung has a notable zeal for paying tribute to the jazz giants who informed her art. At this year’s edition of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival (streamed on June 26), she’ll lead an online trio date with veteran bassist Lonnie Plaxico and Steps Ahead drummer Steve Smith. Called “Bouncin’ with Bud”, the concert will celebrate the music of pianist and composer Bud Powell, a key figure in the postwar movement known as bebop, associated with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

“People tend to associate this music with Thelonious Monk,” Sung says on the line from her home in Queens, “but Bud Powell is closer to the Charlie Parker side of things, with his radical reharmonization of standard tunes. They actually called him the High Priest of Bebop; he had a unique take on stride, with more bass notes, a lot of strength and accuracy, and a pure kind of textured sound.”

Sung herself favours a light touch, delivering an endless cascade of ideas for an effortless effect that’s rhapsodic but also authoritative and playfully darting. Born in Texas to Chinese immigrants who had zero interest in jazz or popular music, she grew up studying classical piano and violin at a performing-arts high school in Houston. She only encountered the jazz tradition at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had what she describes as “a lightning-bolt moment”.

She transferred to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, part of the New England Conservatory of Music. (It recently changed its name to the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.) She later got to tour Asia with Miles Davis veterans Hancock, Ron Carter, and Wayne Shorter, and while in school she learned from the last row of jazz giants still standing in the early 2000s, such as Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, and Barry Harris—all gone now but never forgotten.

“I think of them as the mighty T-Rexes,” she declares with a laugh, “ruling their world. But then the environment changed, and we’re still adjusting. More than technical information, they shared their lives with us. I mean, they literally risked everything to play in the Jim Crow South. These old guys practised tough love and really cared about us and the continuation of the music.”

While starting to record as leader and sidewoman, Sung started teaching at the Berklee College of Music and other prestigious schools. She’s still trying to balance her street knowledge with academia, but the pandemic took away much of the conflict when schools shut down last year. “It was very disorienting. But I ended up finally having the time to consider what I really want to do.”

She’s also manifesting deeper explorations she undertook in 2019 as artistin-residence at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, dedicated to studies of the human brain. Like Monk, Powell had mental issues that both fed into and sometimes thwarted his career. (Powell’s problems might have come partly from a beating by police, and the pioneering pianist died at age 41, in 1966.)

Sung is too modest to mention that she was just named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2021, which means she’ll have more resources available for her hands-on journey through the jazz encyclopedia.

“I still have a long way to go,” she admits. “But I feel like I’ve already faced the hardest part just by getting here. I know that playing jazz has made me the best version of who I am.” g

Houston-born Helen Sung studied classical piano and violin in high school before falling in love with jazz music and touring with Herbie Hancock and other great musicians. Photo by Joseph Boggess.

Alvaro Rojas says that his solo guitar show may be stripped down but it remains very electric.

Helen Sung performs a livestreamed show with Steve Smith and Lonnie Plaxico on June 26 as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Rojas’s music evolves by reconnecting with identity

by Ken Eisner

After almost a century of Charlie Christians, Jeff Becks, and Eddie Van Halens, what’s left to be said with the electric guitar? Plenty, if you ask B.C. guitarist Alvaro Rojas. Actually, you don’t even have to ask him; he’ll answer that question on-stage at two disparate but intimately related shows at this year’s TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Thanks to things going viral in all the wrong ways, he’s had plenty of time to ponder musical history, as well as his own, in the two eventful years since the last live version of the fest, at which Rojas staged a massively ambitious concert called Gran Kasa, employing strings and electric instruments to create a barrage of sounds that managed to be both daring and accessible—descriptors that sit usefully on most of his music.

“I just had so much time,” Rojas explains in a call from his Port Moody home. “Time to get sick of the whole Zoom thing and sort-of playing with others! I grew a lot as a musician over the past year or so, and this is my COVID project, basically. I took the opportunity to develop my solo repertoire. And then I suddenly started hearing a string quartet in my head, and then more instruments on top of that.”

The end product of that process is Alvaro Rojas’ Music for 22, a free show happening next Friday (June 25) at the Ironworks at 4:30 p.m. and available online. (At deadline, event planners were still determining how many audience members could be allowed in the venue.) The guitarist will also appear solo the following Sunday (July 4) for free at the Western Front, likewise at 4:30 p.m.

“The solo show is stripped down but still very electric,” Rojas says. “It’s the same material, just without the other players. A lot of these tunes are based on guitar effects to begin with, so I set up a whole bunch of pedals and get a whole lot of sounds.”

This torrent of aural effect doesn’t come from just anywhere, or even just from the history of the amplified guitar. Rojas was born in Peru and still has extended family in South America. But it took some time for the music of his infancy to resurface.

“I was a real child of the ’90s,” he explains. “I was into grunge and stoked on all kinds of music. But also I grew up listening to my parents’ music in the background.”

The guitarist has also executed a couple of small-film scores, went in various twangy and surfadelic directions on an earlier album called Gala, and went all metallic prog rock on Hellenic Dub under the pseudonym Big Buck. But it wasn’t until he bumped into Afro Peruvian singing star Susana Baca that Rojas found a way to reconcile his competing impulses.

“I saw her at a music festival,” he recalls, “and somehow had the nerve to accost her after the show and ask Susana to appear on my next record.” The incantatory result, “Tu, La Tierra”, is available through Bandcamp.

“Identity is a funny thing,” Rojas says. “It takes a while to find out who you are and what you’re made of.” g

I grew a lot as a musician over the past year or so…

– Guitarist Alvaro Rojas

Alvaro Rojas performs on June 25 at Ironworks and July 4 at the Western Front as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

JAZZ FEST Aganaba overcomes pain through soulful sounds

by Steve Newton

Tonye Aganaba was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis two years before fracturing their spine in six places in a car accident, but when they perform, the pain blows away. Photo by Liz Rosa. their latest album, Something Comfortable, with a stripped-down band composed of guitarist Thomas Hoeller, keyboardist Mary Ancheta, bassist JeanSe Le Doujet, vocalist Corrina Keeling, and drummerpercussionist Aaron Hamblin.

“We’ve been playing in this configuration since 2018,” Aganaba says, “and it’s been a beautiful journey. We went from a 15-person to a five-person band, but I’m excited for the way that the music is transforming.”

Throughout the pandemic Aganaba has been inspired by the work of local artists such as Kimmortal, OZtwelve, and Dawn Pemberton. But there’s one album that they’ve had on repeat the entire time. ”I’m throwing myself under the bus a little bit here because it’s not by a Vancouver artist,” they say, “but I’m gonna go ahead and plug it anyway, because I need to. The album is called Joy Techniques, and it’s by an American artist by the name of Nate Mercereau. “The first single from the album is called ‘This Simulation Is a Good One’, and I just think it’s such an apt reflection of the times that we’re living in, like every single truth that we have been holding sacred is being shaken to its foundation right now, and—I don’t know about you—but I’m ready to get out of this simulation.” g

Tonye Aganaba performs a livestreamed show on June 30 as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, with limited in-person seating.

When you go on YouTube and search for Tonye Aganaba, the first video that pops up is for a song called “We Ain’t Friends”. It’s a live performance recorded in late 2018 at East Van’s Blue Light Studio, and it features about 15 performers crammed together on a stage.

The group sounds soulful and funky as hell, thanks in large part to the vocals of band leader Aganaba. If you’re thinking Chaka Khan in terms of the style, you’re not far off.

When the Straight calls the singer— who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they/them—at home in the Renfrew-Collingwood area, Aganaba calls Khan the biggest influence in their life.

“I feel a lot of affinity with her for a number of reasons,” Aganaba says, “primarily because she’s kind of been, over the years, denigrated for the very public drug use. And as a former illicit-substance user myself, I feel an affinity to those of us who are out there doin’ this work and get caught up in the mess of it all. But she’s always managed to hold herself with such grace and class in spite of all of that, and I respect her so much.”

Born in England to parents of Nigerian and Zimbabwean descent before moving to Canada at 13, Aganaba developed a love of music at an early age. They’ve been singing for as long as they can remember.

“Music is in my veins,” Aganaba states. “We come from a long line of music lovers and music appreciators and my dad really made sure that all of us were exposed to as much music as possible: took us to a lot of concerts, introduced us to incredible artists from around the world.”

Aganaba’s musical career was thrown for a loop when, in early 2015, they were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Yet they’ve managed to turn that discovery into a positive.

“Obviously, being diagnosed with an incurable disease is heartbreaking,” Aganaba relates, “but what it has given me is an abundance of community and an opportunity to connect with what is truly important. Before MS, that was being on the road, hustling every night, making sure I was on-stage, etcetera, etcetera.

“[MS] put a halt to all of that, and all I had to do was just focus on, ‘Okay, how do I live in this new paradigm, how do I live in this new body, and how do I make music in a way that allows me to feel nourished and full instead of depleted and wasted?’ MS allowed me to renew my relationship with myself and the people that I love, and also to find a way to connect with music in a way that heals my spirit and heals my body.”

To add to the challenge, two years after the MS diagnosis, Aganaba was in a car accident that fractured their spine in six places—although you couldn’t tell that from the fluid stage moves on display at the aforementioned Blue Light sessions.

“I’m real good when I get on-stage,” Aganaba explains, “and the pain blows away because endorphins are rushin’ and serotonin is pumpin’. But it takes me a day or two to recover after every show.”

Aganaba expects to blow that pain away during an online jazzfest performance on June 30. They’ll be performing tunes from

MS allowed me to renew my relationship with myself and the people that I love...

– Tonye Aganaba