The bassoonist connecting Indigenous America with Aotearoa

Jacqui Wilson is an Indigenous American bassoonist whose latest album is a recording of music by Māori composers – and it's all because of Taika Waititi.

Wilson, who is a descendant of the Yakama Nation from the northwestern United States, had already released an album of bassoon works by Indigenous American composers when Waititi decided to put his mana and money behind the Indigenous American drama, Reservation Dogs.

For Wilson, the show – written and directed by Indigenous Americans and with an Indigenous American cast – was a revelation.

"It's the first time that many Native American people have seen themselves in contemporary settings reflected back on their TV screens...Every element of that show is indigenous self-representation...and it's so special."

"We've just had Halloween and everyone dressed up as the characters from Reservation Dogs."

The fact that Waititi, an indigenous actor, director and producer from Aotearoa, leveraged his success to support an indigenous project in the USA inspired Wilson to create her own trans-Pacific project.

She began looking for Māori composers to commission work from.

Wilson told RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump that she turned to the SOUNZ website to find composers with Māori ancestry.

"I listened, and I studied the works and I got to know each voice."

Wilson narrowed it down to four composers: Gillian Whitehead (Tainui); Takarei Komene (Ngāpuhi); Phil Brownlee (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira); and Charles Royal (Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Tameterā, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāpuhi).

Gillian Whitehead had already written works for the bassoon, but Wilson had to sell the idea of writing for her instrument to the other three.

"Luckily for me, all three said yes."

The project meant coming to Aotearoa to work with the composers and to get to know the Māori cultural landscape a little better.

On arriving in Auckland, Wilson was immediately struck by the presence of things Māori in everyday life. Street signs, for example.

"And I was like, oh my God, I'm seeing an indigenous language living and thriving and hearing people who are not Māori say  "Kia ora" or speak [Reo]...there is a shared responsibility for preserving the indigenous legacy of this place."

Wilson hopes that her collaborative work with Māori continues, even though her album of Māori music is now complete.

"This is not a project that I'm going to do and then I'll move on from these works and never perform them again. These are not composers who will never hear from me again."

But why play indigenous music on a Western instrument?

Wilson thinks for a moment.

"I'll try to take a long story and make it short."

At first, mastering the bassoon was the ticket to join bands in school, to become part of a club much as someone more into sport might take up baseball or soccer.

She fell in love with that and the music she played, and she knew she wanted to teach.

Wilson's academic success landed her a job at the University of Wisconsin's Eau Claire campus where she met other Indigenous American academics who were combining knowledge of western traditions with their own culture.

"It was the first time in my life that I stopped to think about like, wow, I've never thought that maybe my art could be about more than just me."

Wilson talks briefly about the legacy of the Native American boarding school system, where European teachers repressed indigenous culture and replaced it with western traditions.

"Western music was used in native communities as a tool to re-assimilate and restructure taste to something that was decidedly western...and so the idea of being able to reclaim that legacy...to use western music and western instruments to affirm and assert our identity as native and indigenous people, it struck me as a very empowering way to approach my career."

However, given that history of oppression through classical music, why would Indigenous Americans want to play western music at all, when they surely had their own rich musical culture?

"That's a question I've asked myself a lot."

For Wilson, it boils down to this.

"I fell in love with the classical music first, and I didn't know what I was doing was necessarily subscribing to something decidedly Western...I just knew I loved playing this instrument and I loved playing in band with other people."

"It was never that I chose Mozart over Powwow [an Indigenous American music and dance gathering] and I think that's the 'why'...For some of us, a small group of us, we do love playing the bassoon or the piano or we love Rachmaninov.

"And we love Powwow and we love A Tribe Called Red and we do not have to choose."