Yesi poses for a portrait during Capital B’s oral history project. The musician reflects on the power of rhythm, harmony and music to help people reconnect with truth, creativity and one another.
Why I Believe Music Can Elevate The Spirit
For musician Yesi, music is a conduit that elevates the spirit, nurtures creativity and helps people reconnect with rhythm and harmony.
Yesi Yahme is a musician who believes music is far more than entertainment. Drawing on rhythm, harmony and Indigenous traditions, they see music as a way to elevate the spirit, challenge misinformation and reconnect people with truth, love and purpose. In this reflection, Yesi explains why art can help people heal and imagine a better future.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
I play a little bit of music, mostly baked.
Get people to talk about rhythm, harmony, where we had in the reality of now, where we come from, where we can go.
What I deal with is music and correction.
Right now we’ve been given a lot of false education, everything almost from mathematics, science, definitely history. So in order to break that spell, we use the exact same techniques.
We take music, we make the music. Elevate your spirit opposed to put you into a lower vibration. And then we nurture that through different other arts, because music’s just a conduit.
Music right now has kind of been used to…
And I don’t, you know, as a musician and especially an Indigenous brother of the continent, what we call North America, looking at the transition, music took the ’60s and ’70s to a more commercial, more…
Unelevated is all I can say.
They wanted to put us in a box and they did quite well for a few decades.
And this is the transition, truth coming to the light. All truths are going to be known, and love is actually a power that you haven’t been introduced to fully yet, and you’re about to be introduced to the power of love.
That’s kind of it.
It kind of makes my voice stutter a little bit when I talk about what we’re about to experience because of what created your opportunity to be alive with the grass and the trees and the birds and the bees.
I’d like it to be known concerning me and those who walk right now that we recognized and overcame the beast. We actually came up out of the mire.
We came up fully educated by that which was against harmony, against love and divine purpose, for the fact that we’re here.
And I kind of find that to be an honor that our Creator decided to put me in this time to make these things come to fruition in the midst of everything going on against His will for us.
I shouldn’t say “His”—against the will for us.
