Allana Goldsmith: ‘Jazz and the Maori worldview sit so well together’

Halfway into this interview, Allana Goldsmith stopped talking; she welled up, and had to take a breath. It was obvious we had touched a nerve. She was talking about her effort to reclaim her language, being the first one in her family after generations to learn Maori. It’s an issue that is very close to her heart, having defined her adult life and her artistic endeavour. A magnificent vocalist, whose singing evokes stories and emotions much older than her, going back centuries, she is using her powerful instrument as a form of activism. Along with her musical partner, pianist Mark Baynes, they have created a hauntingly beautiful collection of songs, exploring the ways jazz — in all its iterations — can blend with Maori culture. The result is captivating. Now the duet are coming to Australia, bringing their message of connection.

What’s the story behind E Rere Ra?

Mark Baynes and I have played together in various bands for 10 years, jazz band and cover bands. We decided we wanted to start writing together. We both have children, so we both have little time, and we slogged away at making this album between our busy lives. We never had an idea of what kind of album we’d write, other than that we wanted to make music and see what came out. Some of the songs Mark wrote and then I put lyrics to, and we made them into vocalist songs. The rest we co-composed and worked on together.

In 2021, Dame Hinewehi Mohi, who’s at APRA AMCOS, rang me and said: “have you got a song we could put in Waiata Anthems Week?” That was 2021, just before lockdowns. We quickly put out ‘Tipuna‘, our first single. In 2022 we put out the album. We spent a week in the studio with Tom Dennison on bass, Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa on drums, and Riki Bennett on Taonga Puoro.

The first and last songs are both freely improvised, live recorded in the studio, no editing, that’s as they were. The free opening is a kind of prayer or blessing, musical but mainly with Maori lyrics. The last one, ‘Piata Colonna‘, is a lament to the dead, also recorded live in the studio that day.

Mark and I dreamed up these songs and received funding from Creative New Zealand to make the album. In 2022 we released some singles and then the full album. We didn’t do much with it after that. I finished my Masters in Music in the same year and wrote about the album as part of it. We were exhausted, so we left it. We made some music videos, and now, in 2024, we’ve been looking at where we can take it again, with new energy.

Where do you both come from?

Mark has been in New Zealand about 20 years. He’s from the UK, he’s travelled and toured a lot, met his wife here — she’s also from England — and they settled. We met at jazz school, Mark was one of my teachers.

I had already been gigging for 10 years before that. I’ve been singing jazz standards for 20 years, from when I was 16. I found Billie Holiday and ended up singing ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man’ in my school show. I was always pegged as ‘the jazz singer’ at high school.

When I was 19, I took myself to jazz festivals, met musicians, and said I wanted to sing jazz. I was taken under the wing of older players, mentored by bassists and drummers, and learned the old-school way: around jam sessions, learning everything by ear, then doing transcriptions.

Then I had my children. When my youngest kids were 4 and 2 years old, I got bored. People had always told me to go to jazz school. My background is in environmental science, marine conservation, but that didn’t really take off. After I had kids and got bored, I decided to go back to school and see what I could learn, see if I could take it further.

I kept gigging, I stayed more and more on the scene, probably playing more covers and R&B music. I had to relearn a lot of that because that’s what pays the bills.

I enjoy writing with different people, but Mark and I share the same philosophy in jazz. We both learned from one of the same trumpeters, Kim Paterson; he’s in his late 80s and lives in Auckland. Even though Mark is maybe 10 years older than me, we both come from the same idea of passion and the beauty of jazz. We understood each other, we share the love of diving deep into songs. We have similar ideas about how things should sound, especially in post-production.

Why do you sing jazz in Maori?

It’s definitely not common. Here in New Zealand, jazz is dominated by white males. There’s one other person I always quote, Whirimako Black, who started singing jazz standards in te reo Maori. I had this love of jazz, then found people like her and I started doing what she does. I also wanted to compose and write poetically in my language, then sing it.

For me, jazz was a vehicle for learning and reclaiming my language. I didn’t grow up with my language. I’m the first speaker of Maori in four generations in my family.

I’ve spent my whole adult life, 20 years, learning my language. We lived in the city. I grew up with my mother’s Pakeha [Kiwi European settler] side. My father and grandparents on his side were beaten for speaking Maori. It was outlawed in New Zealand. The saying here is it takes one generation to lose a language and three generations to bring it back. My children are fluent.

It is very much a radical, activist thing to do. But before activism, it was about my children, bringing the language to them. I started learning when I had them. I went into total immersion classes full time, Monday to Friday, to try and learn it, because it’s not spoken here, you have to find where it is. It was a longing for my language, something you feel you’ve been robbed of.

That’s the story of the album, starting with an opening blessing, finishing with a tribute to our ancestors, a lament to the loss of our language.

The whole album is me drenching everything I can in how I feel about the language, how I want to reflect that in my music, and how I merge these two worlds that I love. It’s deeply personal to me.

When people ask why I sing in this language, I’m never put off. When my kids were young, I was part of a movement called Pepi Maori for Grownups, a group of mums who wanted to speak Maori loudly to our children. The idea was to normalise the language, to bring it into our everyday. It’s part of that movement.

How ‘Maori’ is jazz?

For me, jazz is the vehicle. It’s been dispersed throughout the world and across cultures. It’s the improvisational nature of it, the phrasing, it can mould itself to many things, and it has such a broad range.

I started releasing Maori jazz crossover pop around 2016. The first was a bossa nova called ‘Whakaari‘, a lament and longing to go home. Whakaari is White Island, the volcano in the Bay of Plenty. A lot of Brazilian people came up to me and said te reo Maori sounds so beautiful with bossa nova.

There are bridges between the two, between jazz and Maori culture. When a woman does a karanga, the call onto the marae, it’s an improvised conversation between two women calling to each other. That’s what’s happening on the bandstand in jazz.

I’m trying to tell a story, to tell you who I am. Jazz and the Maori worldview, the art form of karanga, they sit so well together.

There’s much more I’m investigating now, seeing how far I can push it. Right now I’m into experimental sonic sounds, exploring a Maori-centric worldview.

What is a Maori-centric worldview?

The Maori worldview, one way we talk about it is through the value system: manaaki, hospitality, how you treat others, respect, the family and relational way, how you relate to everything. Similar to democracy in jazz, where everyone gets a voice. In Maori society, every part is important, from children to grandparents. I love that way in jazz too — the respect for elders. For me, the jazz thinking and the Maori thinking are very close.

What do you want people to understand about Maori culture through your music?

I think people should know how dynamic and complex Maori culture is. We were heavily colonised, but we have a treaty, and we’re still trying to retain and bring back our language. We’re all at different stages of that journey.

When people ask: “can you do a haka,” I say no. I didn’t grow up doing the haka. I grew up singing Billie Holiday standards. Not everybody speaks the language. People assume we can all do a haka or speak Maori, and that’s a myth.

It’s a controversial time right now with this government. There’s a lot going on, and there are Maori on both sides. It’s a hard time. But being Maori is about compassion and manaaki; how we look after each other and respect others. For me, that’s a big value of being Maori, but also just being human.