Pure joy in harmony
Dripping with honeyed beauty and glowing with heartfelt warmth, this landmark album is a triumph. Singer-songwriter Gina Williams and guitarist Guy Ghouse have laid down an important stepping stone in what will hopefully be an irresistible and sustained renaissance in Noongar language and culture.
Their debut album Kalyakoorl (Forever) opens up the evocative strength of Noongar, the indigenous language of south-western WA, to wider appreciation and understanding.
Gurrumul Yunupingu has famously sung in Yolngu on his albums but his language of Arnhem Land is much more widely spoken than Noongar, which has about only 250 fluent speakers.
Kalyakoorl, with its 12 finely crafted folk, jazz and pop tunes, is the first full-length album sung entirely in Noongar.
As others of her generation are now doing, Williams has made it her mission to reconnect to her cultural traditions by first learning and then spreading the word, in a literal sense.
This album is part of an encouraging wave of cultural reclamation and assertion through language.
Noongar also is the focus of a new project to create the world's first Aboriginal online encyclopaedia.
Professor Leonard Collard at the University of WA's School of Indigenous Studies is leading the $610,000, three-year project with colleagues at Curtin University. He has likened it to similar renaissances in Welsh and Maori, other languages which also almost disappeared as a result of colonisation.
The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, involving two-time Miles Franklin Prize winner Kim Scott, is another vehicle. Elders and other community members tell and illustrate traditional stories in Noongar, presenting them in books with English translations.
And Perth's Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company achieved a world-first by performing six Shakespearean sonnets in Noongar at the Globe theatre in London during the 2012 Olympics.
Williams has said that in terms of the fight for survival she thinks music is a beautiful weapon of choice.
Introduced to the jazz music of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole by her father, Williams was inspired to write and sing in Noongar by her mother and grandmother, who were part of the stolen generations and forbidden from speaking their native languages.
Williams has reclaimed her language as an adult and Kalyakoorl remains a family affair, with her daughters Lauren and Bella McGill harmonising beautifully on backing vocals.
There are barely a handful of English words throughout the album, which are occasional reference points to help navigate the emotions of songs like Moorditj Balladong Yok (Strong Balladong Woman), which is a reggae-tinged localisation of Sting's Englishman in New York: "We are standing here together as one."
But this is not only an important cultural document - it is a plain lovely musical gem.
That much is evident in Boorda (By and By), a soaring, poignant song about saying goodbye to beautiful friends, and Maambart (Father), about missing her father all these years after his death in 1981.
This is an album that opens its arms to the listener, embraces the past and reaches out to the future in the spirit of the title song Kalyakoorl: Koora koora, yeyi, benang. (Past, Present, future.)
Ghouse, one half of the smooth jazz duo Desert Child, brings his pure strumming and exquisite picking as the perfect accompaniment to Williams' incandescent voice.
Co-produced at Crank Studios with Lee Buddle, Kalyakoorl also features Russell Holmes on piano, Roy Martinez on bass and Arunachala Satgunasingam on percussion.
Williams' clear vocal phrasing of the sweet melodies and the bilingual lyrics in the CD sleeve also invite the listener to learn at least a few words of this language so intrinsic to this place in which we all live. As she sings on the album's last track Wanjoo (Welcome), an upbeat number with Ghouse on the uke: "Wanjoo, wanjoo kwobidak koorda (Welcome, welcome beautiful friends).
