Red Ride Tour hits the sonic highway

The Red Ride Tour showcases First Nations artists who share a passion for exploration, both on-stage and on the road

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      Never underestimate the power of two young musicians in a subcompact car.

      When singer-songwriter Kristi Lane Sinclair came up with the concept of the Red Ride Tour, she was dreaming big and driving small, contemplating a cross-country trek in a vehicle that was barely large enough to fit her, cellist Cris Derksen, and their instruments. And while the name of the annual event references their shared First Nations heritage, it was actually inspired by something quite different.

      “The first year, I basically had a little bit of money for a tour, and I had a small, red hatchback,” the effervescent Sinclair explains, interviewed along with rapper and producer Ronnie Dean Harris, aka Ostwelve, over coffee and eggs at the Red Wagon diner in Hastings-Sunrise. “So I was thinking, ‘Well, who do I bring with me? I can fit one other person.’ So I thought about Cris, who I’d met earlier that year. I was like, ‘She can play with me as my accompanist, and she’s her own solo artist. So we’ve got two acts in a hatchback, and we can cheaply go anywhere we want to go.’

      “We named it Red Ride after my car, and we kinda decided to throw aboriginal parties everywhere we went,” Sinclair adds. “So it started as something cute and fun, and then it became, like, a thing!”

      “The brand is alive!” says the droll, laconic Harris, laughing.

      Now in its fifth year, Sinclair and Derksen’s thing has grown international legs. Among the 15 dates along the 2015 Red Ride Tour are visits to Brooklyn and Seattle, although smaller communities—such as Manitoulin Island’s Wikwemikong reserve—won’t be left out.

      Red Ride remains an adventure, with some of the exploration taking place on-stage as well as on the road. For the three acts on the Vancouver bill on Wednesday (May 13)—Sinclair, Ostwelve, and Mohawk singer-guitarist Derek Miller—the tour’s opening night will be a chance to try out new material and even new concepts in front of a supportive audience.

      For Sinclair, the choice is clear: she’ll be unveiling her powerful new album, Dark Matter, on opening night. Produced by Miller and featuring Derksen’s characteristically emotive cello, the disc is a significant departure for Sinclair, whose previous, self-produced efforts skewed more toward folk than the grunge and indie rock the Prince Rupert native, who has both Haida and Cree ancestors, grew up loving.

      “I took a different approach to this album,” she says, adding that while Miller—who’s won two Juno awards for his blend of blues, hillbilly soul, and hard-rocking Mohawk swagger—influenced her musical direction, she also felt the need to change her songwriting method. “Before, my music was always fuelled by my personal life, and I kind of got to the point where I was like, ‘Am I creating chaos in order to write music? Am I writing music to create chaos?’

      “I felt like I was always in this cycle of being just really distraught so I could write the ultimate sad love song,” she continues. “And it worked. It totally worked, and it was really easy: it would just come, and I would have these songs, and they’d be good. And then I got to a place in my life where I was happy, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to let this go, but I really need an album.’ So I went to Greece for three weeks, and spent some time on Salt Spring Island—all these solitude things, where I would think and be bored and reflect on stuff. I’m so related to my environment that if I stayed home I’d just sing about lasagna dinners and ‘I love my cat,’ but with solitude I was able to be really thoughtful. It’s a slower process, but I think it’s a way better process.”

      “You’ve run out of struggle!” Harris suggests.

      “Well, I could find more struggle,” Sinclair says. “I just don’t want to.”

      Harris has a different kind of struggle to contend with. As Ostwelve, he won an underground reputation for his barbed and often politicized slice-of-life narratives. But in 2011 the former high-school dropout took a break to continue his education and he recently graduated from the Justice Institute of B.C.’s Aboriginal Leadership Certificate program. The Stó:lō performer half-jokingly suggests that his Red Ride contribution will be “a lecture, maybe on the history of urban Vancouver and the removal of Coast Salish artistry and culture”, and then more seriously admits that he’s in the middle of redefining his approach to music and art.

      “I’m turning 36 this year, you know,” he says. “The 20-year-old-rap-guy archetype—turning my hat to the side and jumping on-stage—probably isn’t going to work for me much longer. So I’m thinking about how I do music, thinking about what the narrative is going to be—and it’s going to be a lot different from what I was doing before, which was just making people as uncomfortable and awkward as I felt at the time. That was the goal at one point, and then it was making everybody feel angry for a while, and then making everybody dance.…So it kind of goes through these phases of, ‘What do I want to say now?’ ”

      Miller is also in an experimental mode. In a separate phone interview from the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, he says long-time fans might be a little shocked by what he’s been working on in the past few months.

      “I’m taking this opportunity to focus on electronic music,” explains the guitarist and singer, whose most recent efforts have examined classic Mississippi blues numbers (Blues, Vol. 1) and the Native side of North American rock ’n’ roll (the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian–commissioned Rumble: A Tribute to Native Music Icons).

      “I’ve been in the studio with the bass player, and we’ve been working with [the computer program] Ableton Live, and I’m using a synth controller on my guitar now, so I can switch back and forth between sounds. We’re just going to experiment that way for probably more than half of the set, but then I’ll play some of my standard songs that people have come to expect from me, just to give them something they can recognize. But I’m planning on having fun with this electronic music—with a live drummer, of course.”

      That’s interesting news, and it highlights the futility of trying to pin a label on these artists. All three work in other media: Sinclair is directing an hourlong film on the Sasquatch in West Coast tradition, as well as starring in a six-part APTN documentary on her life and music; Miller has his own APTN comedy show, Guilt Free Zone; and Harris is writing for Miller’s show and developing his media-art and graphic-design practices. Harris has also been teaching writing skills to at-risk aboriginal youth, using spoken word and rap as a starting point; Miller has been offering advice to emerging First Nations recording artists in Florida and California; and the Vancouver Cantata Singers have commissioned Sinclair to write a choral piece about Canada’s miss-ing and murdered aboriginal women.

      You could say they’re renaissance artists, and Canada’s aboriginal culture is experiencing a renaissance of its own, which is generating a revolution in the way First Nations people are perceived. The Red Ride Tour is both an exploration and a celebration of this new development—and, as Sinclair promises, “a party for all our friends”, no matter what their heritage or shade of skin.

      The Red Ride Tour kicks off at the Fairview Pub on Wednesday (May 13).

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