Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 44
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