Juno Awards underdogs The Jerry Cans

Of all the “smaller” CanCon acts to root for on the nominees list and the performance schedule at this weekend’s Juno Awards celebrations in Vancouver, Iqaluit’s Jerry Cans might be the easiest underdogs to get behind.

True, the feisty Nunavut folk-rock party band wound up losing in the two categories in which it was up for awards during Saturday night’s pre-broadcast Juno gala at the Vancouver Convention Centre. They watched this year’s Breakthrough Group of the Year title go to blowin’-up Toronto ladies the Beaches and the Contemporary Roots Album of the Year trophy to veteran singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn’s Bone on Bone rather than their own late-2016 offering, Inuusiq/Life. But the Cans had already won at the Junos the moment they touched down in Terminal City.

Nary a year-and-a-half after launching Nunavut’s first indie label, Aakuluk Music, with the express intent of “sharing the sounds of the Arctic with the world” — most of those sounds delivered in the native Inuit tongue of Inuktitut — and a mere six months after doubling down on their intentions with the launch of the first-ever Nunavut Music Week in Iqaluit last September, the Jerry Cans are indeed beginning to draw ears, eyes and music-industry attention to the remarkably vital music scene that exists in isolation in the Canadian north. Case in point: the Cans have overcome distance, geography and a history of popular indifference in this country to any music that’s not sung in English or French and landed a prime performance spot alongside host Michael Bublé, the Arcade Fire, Diana Krall, Lights, Arkells, Daniel Caesar and the reunited “1.0-version” Barenaked Ladies on the CBC’s Juno Awards broadcast to be aired nationally on Sunday night.

True to the Aakuluk spirit, too, they’re bringing a bunch of friends from the North to Vancouver along with them: charming Pangnirtung popster Riit, Josh Qaumariaq of rippin’ Iqaluit “Arctic-soul” combo the Trade-Offs, throat singer Avery Keenainak and James Ungalaq of Igloolik’s Northern Haze, conquering hard-rock heroes at home in Nunavut who’ve performed outside of the territory just once before in their nearly 35-year existence — in Vancouver, coincidentally, for Expo ’86. And they will most definitely be singing in Inuktitut, not English.

“When we heard that there might be a possibility to perform during a live broadcast of the Juno awards, we were astounded!” confesses Nancy Mike, the Inuk throat singer and accordionist who co-fronts the Jerry Cans with her husband, Andrew Morrison. “We were all wide-eyed and super stoked, but also we were asked to not say a word about it, even to family or friends, so we had to keep it to ourselves for a while when, really, we wanted to yell it out and tell the world … It’s amazing to have them all here with us. It has been our dream to see Nunavut artists bloom and this is it. It’s happening.

“Personally, I feel like the rest of the world is finally understanding that white culture and language are actually not the only ways art can be recognized. I feel so good and amazing, and this is how white people must feel on a day-to-day basis in the society we have been living in over these many years of colonialism. I will not express best in English, so I am very glad to sing in Inuktitut and to let people all across the nation to know and understand that Indigenous languages are important.”

The Trade-Offs’ Qaumariaq — or Josh Q., as the hotshot guitarist and singer is better known to the lucky few (less few each day) who know him — laconically sums up the experience of being caught up in the Juno-weekend whirlwind as “pretty surreal.”

“I feel really honoured the guys asked me to join them here,” he emailed from Vancouver on Friday. “Northern Haze was recording an album at our studio for our TV show Qanurli and Andrew one day says the Junos might want (the Jerry Cans) to play the Sunday night and ‘Who do you want to collaborate with?’ The Junos had some awesome suggestions, but Andrew realized how amazing it would be to have all Nunavut musicians on stage with them. That’s kind of how it started.

The endlessly hard-working Jerry Cans have been instrumental in catapulting Nunavut music to the national platform it suddenly enjoys. Short of Cambridge Bay-raised Inuk avant-garde powerhouse (and fellow Juno nominee) Tanya Tagaq, no Northern act enjoys a higher profile in Canada and abroad at the moment, and the Cans’ efforts to establish a gathering point and a launching pad for Nunavut talent — first with Aakuluk Music and more recently with the creation of Nunavut Music Week — have borne fruit in an impressively short period of time.

The music sells itself; it just needs to be heard by the right people. Which is precisely why the Jerry Cans and their co-conspirators took a gamble on bringing a handful of promoters, managers, journalists — this very grateful writer/delegate among them — and other industry folk up to Iqaluit to show them the Artic goods, as it were, and glean as much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of how the music business works as possible during the inaugural Nunavut Music Week last fall.

It worked. We were a small group, mostly friends who’ve worked in and around the Canadian music business for some time, and we all left the event awed at the talent we encountered on Baffin Island, clutching a bunch of new friends from the North to our hearts forever, to boot. We’ve been singing their praises to any of our peers who’ll listen ever since. One of our number just booked the by-all-reports rippin’ Jerry Cans show that nearly sold out the Mod Club in Toronto on March 22 (I was, alas, angrily FOMO-ing out whilst stranded in an airport in Charlotte, NC, for 13 hours) and the band has since been added to this year’s CBC Music Fest bill at Echo Beach on May 26 alongside July Talk, A Tribe Called Red, Charlotte Day Wilson and the Rural Alberta Advantage.

Canada’s a small country, its music industry even smaller, and word is getting around. Not bad considering Nunavut Music Week was so small and casual and off-the-cuff in its first iteration that it didn’t even have a website — the internet service ain’t great in Nunavut, anyway — and also considering its second day of showcases had to be hastily moved to drummer Steve Rigby’s house on the fly when a freak late-September blizzard completely shut down the town and its sole viable live venue, the local Legion hall, on the Saturday afternoon.

“It was a huge step for Nunavut and Inuit performers,” Josh Q says of the event. “I know the guys have been working really hard the last couple years and am very proud of them.”

Mike, who also laced up for the Juno Cup rockers-vs.-pros hockey game in Vancouver on Friday night in hopes of challenging Olympian Nathalie Spooner for the puck, is modest about what she and her friends have accomplished.

“We played that show last night at the Mod Club and Josh opened for us and we have never been so proud,” she said on Friday. “Josh took me to his prom back in the day, and we have been good friends for over a decade now and we were all in tears of joy just seeing him soar. Y’know, hard work pays off and this is just one of those examples. There is so much talent in Nunavut and having Nunavut Music Week has opened up not only opportunities for artists but also given the rest of Canada an eye-opener to what there is in Nunavut and what the music scene is like up there.”

Does it occur to her that she and her friends are kinda making history with Sunday night’s Juno performance?

“I think this is happening in such a natural way for us that we have no time to think about these things,” she says. “We love doing what we do and that will always be the basis of what happens in the Jerry Cans/Aakuluk Music world.”

Correction — March 25, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly stated that Tanya Tagaq was raised in Rankin Bay.