The Jerry Cans

Andrew Morrison, Brendan Doherty and Steve Rigby grew up together in the Happy Valley neighbourhood of Iqaluit and had been playing music together since high school. Morrison started out in a children's fiddle group and later turned up the volume in a high school punk band. After graduating, the three went south to Peterborough, Ontario for school, and there in the mid-2000s they started a blues rock trio. Rigby had once tried to build a drum kit out of old jerrycans, and the band took its name from that. In Inuktitut they are Pai Gaalaqautikkut.

Back home in Iqaluit the band grew into something else. Nancy Mike, an Inuk throat singer and accordionist from Pangnirtung, joined around 2012. She had learned the button accordion by ear as a girl, taking turns with her best friend on a song her friend's father played, and took up throat singing after a visiting duo held workshops in her town. Gina Burgess, a Halifax violinist who also played with Gypsophilia, first came north in 2009 on an exchange between the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts and the Iqaluit Fiddle Ensemble. She stayed with Morrison's mother, and before long she and Morrison were running music camps in remote Nunavut communities, which brought her into the band. Accordion and fiddle had been part of life on Baffin Island since the Scottish whalers of the 1800s, and the Jerry Cans mixed those sounds with throat singing, country swing, reggae, blues and the leftover punk energy of the founders. They named their influences as Simeonie Keenainak, Charlie Adams and the Uvagut band on one side and The Clash, The Pogues and Johnny Cash on the other.

Morrison had studied Inuktitut and was nervous at first about singing in it, but before long most of his songs were written in the language. He and Mike fell in love and married, and her father Laivi, who spoke only Inuktitut, made sure Morrison learned it properly so he could pass it on to their children.

The band built its following in legion halls, community halls, garages and store fronts across Nunavut. By the summer of 2012 the five-piece was playing Folk on the Rocks in Yellowknife, the Alianait festival at home and shows in Greenland. Their debut album, Nunavuttitut ("Nunavut style"), was recorded around Iqaluit that summer, some of it on coffee breaks, and launched at the Royal Canadian Legion in Iqaluit on January 19, 2013, with fans encouraged to come dressed in sealskin. The songs dealt with northern life as the band lived it, from 'Northmart' to 'Dear PETA' and 'GN Song', and the hometown favourite was 'Mamaqtuq', a song about eating seal stew. That year Mike won Aboriginal Songwriter of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards.

The Jerry Cans found their way to a southern studio by reading the credits on the Strumbellas' first album, which had been made at the Woodshed in Toronto. They cut their second album, Aakuluk, there in a week with producer Tim Veseley, and released it on June 13, 2014. The title is an Inuktitut expression of affection. This time the songs moved between Inuktitut and English within each song, so a listener could pick up words as the verses mirrored each other. 'Qanurli Isumavit' took on youth suicide in Nunavut head on, and Morrison admitted it was a hard song to sing every time. That summer they became the first Nunavut band to play NXNE in Toronto, though Morrison joked that they could not claim to have made it until they had played Pangnirtung and Arviat, which he called the New York and Tokyo of Nunavut. The album picked up two more Canadian Folk Music Award nominations in 2015.

Record labels liked what they heard but kept telling the band they could not understand what it was singing about. The Strumbellas told them to start their own, and the band had already been applying for funding and promoting its records under the name Aakuluk Music. In 2016 Mike, Morrison and Rigby launched it as a full label, billed as the first in Nunavut, to give young Inuit and Indigenous musicians a place to record in their own language. Its first release was the band's third album, Inuusiq/Life, recorded at the Woodshed with producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda and issued on November 4, 2016 through Pheromone and Fontana North. The band called it a serious reflection on culture, politics, family and land. The lead single, 'Ukiuq', also appeared in English as 'Northern Lights', the first time they had recorded a song in both languages. On 'Nirliit', a throat song imitating Canada geese, Burgess played the second voice on violin. She had first arrived in the North a vegetarian who protested the seal hunt, and by now she held a hunting licence. Aakuluk Music went on to release Aasiva, FxckMr, Riit, Terry Uyarak and The Trade-Offs, and in November 2018 it put out Siqinnaarut, the first album in 33 years by the Igloolik rock band Northern Haze.

With Canada Council support the band toured Australia and New Zealand in 2016, playing WOMAD in New Zealand, with Morrison and Mike's two young daughters along. In Adelaide and Canberra, Mike met descendants of her Scottish whaling ancestors, the first contact between the two families in more than 80 years, and found that her Australian cousins also had a band, The Fuelers. The Jerry Cans went back to Australia for the festival circuit the following year and also played Scotland, Germany, Cuba and Norway. In 2017 they released an Inuttitut version of the Tragically Hip's 'Ahead by a Century', organized the first Nunavut Music Week, turned 'Mamaqtuq' into a bilingual children's board book illustrated by Eric Kim, and recorded songs for the APTN children's series Anaana's Tent, including its theme.

Inuusiq/Life earned two nominations at the 2018 Juno Awards in Vancouver, for Breakthrough Group of the Year and for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year, where they were up against Bruce Cockburn and Buffy Sainte-Marie. They played 'Ukiuq' on the national broadcast with members of the Aakuluk Music family: Josh Qaumariaq of the Trade-Offs, Avery Keenainak, Riit and James Ungalaq of Northern Haze, one of Morrison's musical heroes since childhood. Six Shooter took on their management that year, and the band picked up three Western Canadian Music Award nominations. They also cut the single 'Clouds' in Lindsay, Ontario, written and co-produced with Simon Ward and Darryl James of the Strumbellas.

Avery Keenainak, a throat singer, accordionist and textile artist raised in Taloyoak and Pangnirtung, is the granddaughter of Simeonie Keenainak, the accordion player the band had named as an early influence. After appearing with them as a guest, she joined Nancy Mike in the early 2019 sessions for the fourth album at Jace Lasek's Breakglass Studio in Montreal, where the band ran its instruments through Lasek's effects pedals. Keenainak became a full-time member that year, and Mike left in January 2020. At the 27 Club in Ottawa that February, Keenainak and Morrison traded lead vocals on 'Havava' days before its release, and Morrison told the crowd they had both nearly passed out singing it. Echoes came out on Aakuluk Music on May 15, 2020. It was a long way from the square-dance party of the early records: glassy electric guitars, heavy drums, effects-warped throat singing, drones and dark violin, with stretches of shoegaze and post-punk. While they were making it, two of the band's childhood friends died by suicide, and that grief runs through the record. The 14 songs included 'Atauttikkut', 'Havava', 'On the Rocks' and 'Swell (My Brother)', a song about loneliness and suicide whose video, shot in Iqaluit by Rigby, honoured people working across Nunavut. A North American tour opened at Folk Alliance International in New Orleans in January and ran across Canada into March before the pandemic shut it down.

The band never returned to the road and settled on an open-ended hiatus. Morrison later spoke about years of pressure from broadcasters, radio and marketers to sing more in English, and accepted as fair the criticism from small Nunavut communities that the band had rarely played there. He kept Aakuluk Music going from a home studio in Iqaluit, and on January 26, 2024 released Euphemisms on the label under the name Echoes Of..., much of it built from tracks he made in hotel quarantine after a trip south. James Ungalaq, Greenland's Naja P, Terry Uyarak and Jace Lasek all worked on it. On August 21, 2026 he followed it with Last Days, six piano pieces each paired with an Inuktitut poem written and read by James Ungalaq or Terry Uyarak. Some of the piano began as voice notes from the pandemic, when Morrison played for his mother in care each morning; he called it a grief album and a life album. The Jerry Cans have not announced a return.

-Robert Williston

•       Andrew Morrison: vocals, guitar

•       Brendan Doherty: bass

•       Steve Rigby: drums

•       Nancy Mike: accordion, throat singing, vocals (by 2012 to January 2020)

•       Gina Burgess: violin (by 2012)

•       Avery Keenainak: accordion, throat singing, vocals (guest from 2018, member from 2019)