Mali Obomsawin

Mali Obomsawin plays bass and sings, and her music refuses to sit inside one genre. She is a member of the Odanak Abenaki First Nation, and that heritage runs through her work not as a footnote but as a foundation, connecting jazz and folk vocabulary to Indigenous song traditions.

In 2024 she scored Sugarcane, a National Geographic documentary, original music built to carry a serious and difficult story. She also leads a band called Deerlady, the primary vehicle for her own compositions, a group that moves fluidly between jazz improvisation, folk songcraft, and material rooted in Indigenous tradition.

What makes Obomsawin's work distinct is how naturally those threads sit together in her hands. She is not borrowing from multiple traditions so much as working from a personal one that always contained all of them. Between her film scoring and her work with Deerlady, she has built a catalog that expands what people expect a jazz bassist and bandleader to sound like.