Tanya Tagaq

Singer Tanya Tagaq hails from the Nunavut autonomous region in northern Canada, a gateway to the North Pole. She's a progressively spirited musician who is extending the technique of Inuit "throat singing," a tradition usually pairing two women in a singing game that simulates the sounds of nature. Tagaq, however, is not as interested in preserving tradition as she is in impelling it into entirely new musical forms.

Tagaq's appearance at California Plaza's Grand Performances on Saturday night was a bracing, exploratory experience. Tagaq demonstrated the modernist bent that has found her collaborating with similarly inclined artists, including vocal work on Björk's 2004 "Medulla" album and 2005's "Vespertine" tour, and performances with the Kronos Quartet in 2008. Tagaq's 2008 album "Auk/Blood" was released through Mike Patton's avant-leaning Ipecac Recordings label.

Despite struggling with a sore throat that clearly limited her vocal range and volume, Tagaq, accompanied by percussionist Scott Amendola and string player Jesse Zubot, pulled off a hair-raising set of extended, entirely improvised pieces. Sprawling Northern vistas were conjured in the compositions -- a sense of a howling, icy wind blasting one's face, perhaps.

Writhing and clutching her chest as if in emotional and physical pain one moment, and then in sensual joy the next, Tagaq cajoled and regaled in a variety of animal grunts, guttural gasps, cries and whispers. It was a lyrically ambiguous vocalese, most reminiscent of vocal-technique expanders such as Diamanda Galás and Yoko Ono. Modest usage of digital-delay filters further extended the dramatic effects.

Appropriately, Amendola and Zubot's accompaniment was far-reaching yet discreetly pitched against Tagaq's primal vocal outpourings, employing a free-jazz-type range of methods far outside conventional modes of playing. Amendola's rattles and explosive tom-tom thumps were run through an array of sampling/delay filters, as was the high-tension violin and viola work of Zubot.

David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet calls Tagaq "the Jimi Hendrix of Inuit throat singers," and the analogy is spot-on. Like Hendrix, Tagaq seeks to elicit the valuable, primitive unconscious -- the internal made external -- that lies dormant and untapped in us all. Yet, as with Hendrix, it was the future-leaning, musically avant-garde approach she took in drawing out these primordial impulses that was the evening's biggest thrill.

-- John Payne
- LA Times

The avant-garde Kronos Quartet first grabbed mainstream attention back in 1986, with a startling string arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic classic Purple Haze. Two decades later, the Grammy-winning U.S. string ensemble – still as adventurous as ever – has finally found its own, living Hendrix to collaborate with: one-of-a-kind Nunavut throat singer Tanya Tagaq.
“To me, there’s no one that plays a guitar like Jimi Hendrix did,” says Kronos founder David Harrington, speaking by phone from a tour stop in Le Mans, France. “And there’s no singer I know of like Tanya Tagaq. She takes the technique of throat-song games – something two or more people would usually do – and she does it all by herself. And she does it [live]. She is totally amazing to me.”
Tanya Tagaq riffs with her elastic vocal cords the way Jimi Hendrix did with a Stratocaster. Her aural acrobatics have reshaped an Inuit pastime into the stuff of concert-hall virtuosity.
Anyone who has caught a Tagaq performance will appreciate the comparison. The 30-year-old from Cambridge Bay riffs with her elastic vocal cords the way Hendrix did with a Stratocaster. Her aural acrobatics have reshaped an Inuit pastime into the stuff of concert-hall virtuosity. Traditionally, throat singing is a vocal game of catch, in which Inuit women toss sounds into one another’s mouths until one of them “drops the ball” – that is, breaks up laughing. Tagaq, however, plays the game solo, with a dexterity and intensity that sends shivers up your spine. Her singing is a call of the wild, evoking the sharp cries of birds and the guttural grunts of mammals, sometimes all at once. In the throes of one of her performances, Tagaq will actually sing her own counterpoint.
When Harrington first heard her, on a promotional CD in Britain's fRoots magazine, he knew that Kronos had to meet her. Since then, the quartet and Tagaq have teamed up on two pieces: Nunavut, which premiered in 2006, and the new Tundra Songs, composed by Derek Charke. Tagaq, violinist Harrington and his fellow Kronos members – John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello) – will perform both works at Toronto’s Luminato arts festival on June 12 and 13.
- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

“immediately after was a short set from Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. Filling the theatre with low guttural grunts and fierce shrieks, it’s something that can only be experienced live. Sure, a quick YouTube search can give you an idea of her rhythmic, otherworldly sound, but your tinny laptop speakers will never capture that thick rumble from deep below the diaphragm. Where a pair of vocal chords start resembling a turntable, broken bits of radio signal, or most eerily, two entirely independent voices.” - FFWD Magazine