You’ll have a rare opportunity to experience a bit of Canada’s North way down south when Tanya Tagaqre-unites with the Kronos Quartet at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad to perform Nunavut—a programthat mixes music, lighting and throat-singing to paint an Arctic soundscape.
Born in Cambridge Bay, NU, in the Western Arctic, Tagaq whisked traditional Inuit throat-singing out of obscurity and imbued it with her own new-wave, improvisational style. Delivered with lusty live performances, she took that otherworldly sound from the tundra to the world stage on an international tour with Icelandic legend Björk and into hallowed Carnegie Hall with the contemporary string group, the Kronos Quartet.
She’s just one of a number of female Inuit voices hitting the stages and charts these days. Canada’s new Northern chorus includes:

• Élisapie Isaac from Salluit, northern QC is one half of the duo Taima, whose self-titled album won the Aboriginal Recording of the Year Juno in 2005. Her first solo album, to be released in September 2009, is a mix of English, French and “beautiful Inuktitut songs.”
• Nunavut’s gift to alternative rock, Lucie Idlout, opened for The White Stripeswhen they played in Iqaluit and just released her second album, Swagger. Her song Angel Street, about a friend who was abused,inspired the mayors of at least two Canadian cities to rename the street leading to their women’s shelters as a tribute to victims of violence.
• Taqralik Partridge from Kuujjuak, QC, is a throat-singer/spoken-word artist living in Montréal, QC with a unique style that is lilting, edgy, seductive and hypnotic all at the same time. She’s been featured by CBC radio and performed with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (Montréal Symphony Orchestra) in Santa Monica, CA (USA) and across Canada’s North.