Joe Rainey will discuss his musical process in an interactive workshop on Saturday, November 5.
Before his concert that evening at Arts + Literature Laboratory, Joe Rainey will present a free public workshop on Saturday, November 5 from 2:00 to 3:30pm.
Rainey and his colleague Andrew Broder will present an interactive workshop demonstrating how they come up with the musical fusion exemplified by Rainey's latest album, Niineta, followed by a Q&A session. Each song on Niineta started with Broder’s beats, the two artists then experimenting with various sounds and tempos to orchestrate and recontextualize the ancient Pow Wow sound in strange, new in-between places.
Register for the free workshop on our Adult Education page: https://artlitlab.org/adult-education. The workshop is also open to children 7 years-old and above.
“Pow Wow singer Joe Rainey fuses traditional melodies and 'vocables' in something of an avant hip hop partnership, although in addition to beats, there are field recordings, industrial-sounding processed drums, string arrangements, and vocal processing. He describes his music as being on the same river, but a different boat from other pow wow singers and groups.” --WNYC Soundcheck
Joe Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and proudest Native American populations in the country. Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started recording Pow Wow singing groups with his tape recorder. He was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, a community centered in the Little Earth housing projects and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. The neighborhood still serves as a home for both the housed and the un-housed, and the don’t-even-wanna-be-housed Native. It is the birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the pioneering grassroots civil rights organization founded to combat the colonizing forces of police brutality. Rainey came of age in the heart of this community, but always felt like he was living in a liminal space—not that he was uncomfortable with that. “Growing up, knowing that you weren’t from the Rez, but you were repping them, was kind of weird,” he says. “But I liked that.”
By the time Rainey was a teenager, however, he had found enough courage to help start The Boyz Juniors, his first drum group, before going on to sing with Big Cedar, Wolf Spirit, Raining Thunder, and Iron Boy. They were professionals, city Indians travelling all over the north country, repping their reservations and their neighborhoods on every side of every conceivable border—competing for cash and cred, carousing, providing the beat to the grass dances, always striving to capture that “Pow Wow feeling” of togetherness. Rainey was always just as much of a fan as he was a participant—when he wasn’t at his own drum, he was recording other drums, then studying the tapes when he got home, admiring and cataloging the different singing styles, whether it was Northern Cree, Cozad or Eyabay.
Rainey got his album title, Niineta, from his drum brother Michael Migizi Sullivan, who suggested a short version of the Ojibwe term meaning, “just me.” But he’s using the term only in the sense that he’s taking sole responsibility for its content. Rainey is protective of Pow Wow culture—which was outlawed by the United States government for a generation, defiantly maintained in secret by Native elders he deeply respects—while trying to figure out exactly where he fits into it and how he can explore it on his own terms.