Sainte-Marie's 24th album shows passion, care and simple honesty

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Review

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Up Where We Belong;

EMI 1996.

The latest from the first lady of First Nations music, Buffy Sainte-Marie, is much more than a best-of album (which would be her sixth of the kind) and marks more than 30 years of recording.

The 15-track project titled Up Where We Belong contains carefully selected material from albums dating back to 1964 with her first Vanguard release, It's My Way to her latest album Coincidence and Likely Stories, released in 1992.

The album opens with the ever popular Darling Don't Cry with the Red Bull Singers who accompany Buffy. The album begins to take an acoustic turn with a rendition of her 1983 Academy Award winning theme song Up Where We Belong from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.

The popular and often requested Piney Wood Hills was first included on her 1965 album, Many a Mile, and Bobby Bare made it a country hit two years later.

The night chant of frogs and crickets announce the opening of Cripple Creek, a traditional favorite from her first album and introduced her trademark mouthbow that appears once again on the '96 version.

Until It's Time For You To Go initially appeared on her second album, Many A Mile, in 1965 and was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1972 to become a Top 40 hit ascending to number five in the U.K.

The anti-war protest song Universal Soldier from 1964, immediately grabbed the attention of the censors. Her first and subsequent albums were banned from air play by many radio stations due to "the political nature of the lyrics."

Her favorite song Goodnight by Cliff Eberhart, taken from her 1992 album, was initially sung directly into her Mac computer. It marks her return to recording after a 16-year absence. The song also underlines the technological advances of her recording techniques. A powwow setting as suggested by the title Dance Me Around sings of missing the chance to love someone and of the reunion amid the digitized carousel music.

She takes a move from the powwow grounds to bronc riding with her Indian Cowboy In The Rodeo from the 1972 album, Moonshot, this time accompanied by the Stoney Park singers.

The mood conveyed by the instrumentation is exemplified in the track Eagle Man/Changing Woman from the 1975 album, Changing Woman. The song is representative of that album's lyrical content which was inspired by traditional Navajo poetry.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee from her 1992 career-revival release is important in terms of both music and message. Dedicated to Leonard Peltier and written in memory of Anna Mae Aquash and Joseph Stuntz Killsright, it is included on this album with the brief that an informed public can right incredible wrongs.

The album closes with the message of generations and the commitment of contemporary Indian people to persevere and succeed. Starwalker, from her last album before her early retirement in 1976, Sweet America, was originally dedicated to the American Indian Movement.

The material is performed with a laid-back confidence and self-satisfied air of accomplishment, like sitting back with a guitar an strumming out a few old favorites.

Up Where We Belong is the 24th album of an astonishing career and should be available at a record store near you.