Musicians Of The Midnight Sun and ‘The Chieftones’

Pat Braden, host of musicians of the Midnight Sun recently released new episodes featuring interviews with Jonas Antoine, who was heavily involved in the touring and development of all-indigenous band “The Chieftones.” Albert Canadien, who played in the band, has been featured in the past by Braden, but this was a welcome revisiting of this iconic Indigenous Rock and Roll legacy.

To hear more about The Chieftones, Albert and Jonas – you’ll have to listen to Musicians of the Midnight Sun. But Braden shared with us more about his work with this research over the last twenty years and when he first heard about “The Chieftones.”

“Going back to probably one of the first interviews that I did,” Braden said, “going back to early, 2000s I started in 2003 interviewing different musicians and Albert was one of them back then. But I interviewed Tom Hudson, and Tom made reference to band, or a bunch of musicians that came out of Akaitcho Hall before he was there in the mid to late 60s and and so he said, You should follow up on that. So I did, and I was reading through Albert’s interview last night, sort of refresh myself before talking with you. My interviewing skills leave a lot to be desired. Now I can’t 2022, years ago, you know, with a lot of these interviews and stuff like that, I’m sort of coming in very naive about what was happening up here, and big part of the reason why I’m doing this is to just sort of get inside these guys heads, and what were they thinking about?”

Recalling his own journey with music, Braden said”I grew up playing a very old school type of music. When I first started playing music up here in the mid 70s, I was playing jazz standards and clubs, and I was playing big band swing music, which, you know, music goes all the way back to early 1900s and arguably all the way up. But my obsession, I guess was with won the music of that time, but also just the fashions of that time. It was totally different time and recorded the recording music industry coming at us. There’s so many factors that played into popular music and how that sort of came to be. But for me, it was like Jonas going through the Life magazines.”

When I asked him about the political atmosphere at the time “The Chieftones” would have been touring, Braden said “I just get lost in these stories, recognizing the electric guitar and just the disenfranchisement, I guess, of youth coming out of again, post Second World War.”

Pat said, while reflecting on Musicians of the Midnight Sun, where it came from and the inspiration he drew from musicians in the North, said “That, for me, was just a huge part. Are coming out from, you know, skinning the moose or cleaning a whole bunch of fish, and they’re drying the blood off of their hands and grabbing their guitar, the fiddle, and then they go down to the pee and recall, and they just rip it up all night long. Continues to happen up here, and it’s evolving all the time. It was very unique to this place. And so again, the thing for me was to just, yeah, you could, maybe you could find a bunch of these stories spread around, you know, the archives and newspaper interviews and stuff like that, but to have it all together in one place, you know, so that you can actually sort of go through it.” But, he added, “It’s still a work in progress.”

Check out Musicians of the Midnight Sun, and see how many familiar faces you know, and love, whose stories are housed and honoured there.