Aunties Sing… Music is Medicine

Indigenous Artists for this Event!

• Helene Duguay

  Helene Duguay

  [Mikmaq]

  Helene is a legendary bass player, who use to play with ‘The Beatlettes’, an all female pop band in the 1960’s in Montreal. She brings many years experience tearing it up on stages throughout North America and Asia.

  At seventy-five years of age, Helene shows no sign of slowing down, and can hold her own with the best of them on any stage! Proud of her French/Miqmaq heritage, and fluent in French, she performs at numerous fundraisers for various Indigenous communities and organizations throughout British Columbia.She has been featured on the TV shows, Rez Bluez and The Mix, and several episodes of Beyond Words on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Helene also performed bass on both Murray Porter’s albums.

  From the girl groups and go-go boots of the sixties and through all the twists and turns in popular music since, Helene plays all styles with authenticity and heart.

  [Mikmaq]

• Sandy Scofield

  Sandy Scofield

  [Cree/Metis/Dene]

  Sandy Scofield is a multi-award winning composer, musician and singer. She has studied classical, jazz, African, Indonesian gamelan and electro-acoustic music. A Metis from the Saulteaux and Cree Nations, she hails from four generations of fiddlers, singers and musicians. Among her four recordings to date, she has won five Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, a Canadian Folk Music Award, an Indian Summer Music Award (U.S.A.), a Western Canadian Music Award and received three consecutive Juno nominations.

  Over the years, she has mentored innumerable First Nations singers and songwriters in the way of rudimentary music theory, vocal techniques, songwriting craft and music-industry protocol. She has toured to festivals on five continents with the the International Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo, 2011 making the fifth.

  She has composed for dance, film, television and theatre, with the Aboriginal Welcoming Song for the 2010 Olympic Opening Ceremonies, the highlight to date.It’s a long way from playing Cajun party music to a capella vocal arrangements of First Nations songs to composing music for theatre and for our own Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver.

  Sandy Scofield has invested a tremendous spirit, navigating and negotiating through a life dedicated to music, sometimes on her own, and sometimes with collaborators. She studied full-time at Vancouver Community College taking their two-year jazz music program. She completed her degree at the esteemed Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts, studying composition under the likes of Owen Underhill and electroacoustic music with Barry Truax.

  Her passion for electro-acoustic music and sound design is not new for Scofield, who has been playing with sounds for a long time. In a feature in SOCAN’s Words & Music magazine in 2001, Alexander Varty talked to her about using noisemakers or toys, such as the toy piano on “Get High”, each time she embarked on a recording project.She has taken the tool box that she has enhanced as a touring musician, through her composition work at SFU, and from the young musicians she mentors and applied them to her sense of melody, harmony and rhythm, resulting in what writer Phil Paine described as “a high-level synthesis of jazz, blues, rock and pop” with First Nations traditions. “Her music is original, refined and intelligent.”

  [Cree/Metis/Dene]