PhilPaine.com

One of the finest singers in West­ern Cana­da, Sandy Scofield glides effort­lessly from her Métis and Cree musi­cal roots into a high-lev­el syn­the­sis of jazz, blues, rock and pop. Long known in abo­rig­i­nal music cir­cles, she deserves to break out into the glob­al music scene. Her music is orig­i­nal, refined, and intel­li­gent. I pos­sess three of her four albums, Dirty Riv­er (1994), Riel’s Road (2000), and Ket­wam (2002). I have yet to hear all of this year’s release, Nikawiy Askiy, but I’ve heard three songs from it, and they clear­ly indi­cate that her musi­cal evo­lu­tion is con­tin­u­ing with­out hin­drance. Riel’s Road is prob­a­bly the best intro­duc­tion to her work, open­ing with the stun­ning “Beat the Drum (Gath­er­ing Song)”, and going on to explore emo­tion­ally the after­math and con­se­quences of the most dra­matic events in post-Con­fed­er­a­tion Canada’s his­tory, the Métis upris­ing and death of Louis Riel. How­ever, most of the songs on this album have a folk-jazz feel­ing. On Ket­wam, which focus­es on much more tra­di­tional abo­rig­i­nal-métis mate­r­ial, she col­lab­o­rates with the vocal trio Nit­si­wakun, of which she is one mem­ber (the oth­er two are Lisa Saza­ma and Shak­ti Hayes), with fid­dle Daniel Lapp, and with vocal­ist Win­ston Wut­tunee. The Cree-lan­guage songs are the most pow­er­ful. The album is tru­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive. Some are the finest moments belong to Hayes on “Nit­si­mos” and to “Wut­tunee” on “Tap­weh” (a tra­di­tional round dance that would fit in at any west­ern powow).