‘Music is about healing, it’s a spiritual practice’

By singing the old songs but also re-weaving them for our times, two-times Polaris award winner Jeremy Dutcher is helping to reignite a slumbering spirit. He told Jenny White why bringing his latest tour to Wales was so important

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WEAVING classical and jazz influences together with his ancestral language and songs, Jeremy Dutcher's music transcends boundaries, diving and soaring in a lithe dance of shifting rhythms and luminous vocals.

A classically trained tenor, Two-Spirit song carrier, polymuse, activist, ethnomusicologist, and member of Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation) in Eastern Canada, Dutcher is the only person ever to have won Canada's Polaris Prize (equivalent to the UK’s Mercury Prize) twice in 2018 and 2024.

Eschewing popular stops like London and Dublin, his current tour takes him to locations that resonate with his specific aims and vision - including two places in Wales: Bethesda and Ystradgynlais.

The Welsh language is a huge reason for his return. He first came to Wales about seven years ago, to play a gig in Bethesda alongside Welsh band 9Bach. The experience highlighted the similarities between the history of Welsh language suppression and what happened to his own native Algonquian language of Wolastoqey.

"Before coming to Bethesda, I didn’t really know the depth or the story of Welsh language suppression - things like the Welsh Not and the fact that they put young people in schools to try to indoctrinate them into an English or British way," he says. "This is very similar to our story on the other side of the world.

"We had similar suppression of our language, to the point now that in my mother's language of Wolastoqey, we have less than 100 speakers left. I look to Wales and Welsh language revitalisation as a model as to how we can bring our language back to strength and really inculcate society to care about it. The Welsh nation has done a lot to really bolster that language, and the music tradition too.”