Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq (centre) teams with Kronos Quartet for two concerts at Toronto's Luminato arts festival. (Luminato)

The avant-garde Kronos Quartet first grabbed mainstream attention back in 1986, with a startling string arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic classic Purple Haze. Two decades later, the Grammy-winning U.S. string ensemble – still as adventurous as ever – has finally found its own, living Hendrix to collaborate with: one-of-a-kind Nunavut throat singer Tanya Tagaq.

“To me, there’s no one that plays a guitar like Jimi Hendrix did,” says Kronos founder David Harrington, speaking by phone from a tour stop in Le Mans, France. “And there’s no singer I know of like Tanya Tagaq. She takes the technique of throat-song games – something two or more people would usually do – and she does it all by herself. And she does it [live]. She is totally amazing to me.”

Tanya Tagaq riffs with her elastic vocal cords the way Jimi Hendrix did with a Stratocaster. Her aural acrobatics have reshaped an Inuit pastime into the stuff of concert-hall virtuosity.

Anyone who has caught a Tagaq performance will appreciate the comparison. The 30-year-old from Cambridge Bay riffs with her elastic vocal cords the way Hendrix did with a Stratocaster. Her aural acrobatics have reshaped an Inuit pastime into the stuff of concert-hall virtuosity. Traditionally, throat singing is a vocal game of catch, in which Inuit women toss sounds into one another’s mouths until one of them “drops the ball” – that is, breaks up laughing. Tagaq, however, plays the game solo, with a dexterity and intensity that sends shivers up your spine. Her singing is a call of the wild, evoking the sharp cries of birds and the guttural grunts of mammals, sometimes all at once. In the throes of one of her performances, Tagaq will actually sing her own counterpoint.

When Harrington first heard her, on a promotional CD in Britain's fRoots magazine, he knew that Kronos had to meet her. Since then, the quartet and Tagaq have teamed up on two pieces: Nunavut, which premiered in 2006, and the new Tundra Songs, composed by Derek Charke. Tagaq, violinist Harrington and his fellow Kronos members – John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello) – will perform both works at Toronto’s Luminato arts festival on June 12 and 13.

Singer Tanya Tagaq. (Luminato)

Tundra Songs is making its Canadian debut, having had only one previous performance, at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in May. Canadian composer Charke, another Kronos collaborator, wrote it for the quartet and Tagaq after spending time with them in Whitehorse during the making of Nunavut. “When we find a relationship like the one we have with Tanya, it’s something we want to develop,” Harrington says. “That’s why I’m so pleased with Derek’s new piece. It’s allowed Kronos and Tanya to just expand what we can do.”

Like the improvisation-based Nunavut, Charke’s 30-minute Tundra Songs gives Tagaq free rein to work her vocal voodoo. “Derek tells me when he wants me to sing, but he doesn’t tell me what sounds to make,” says Tagaq, speaking from Cambridge Bay. “He gives me loose ideas, and I can kind of move around in them. It’s different every time we do it, but I try to stay as close as I can to the general idea of what should be happening.”

Tagaq is one of those pure musical talents who seem to spring up from nowhere. The daughter of an Inuk mother and a British father (her full name is Tanya Tagaq Gillis), she says she never sang as a child. She began her solo throat singing as a homesick visual arts student in Halifax, and then only in the place where most of us sing: the shower. “That’s where I sang for, like, a year,” she recalls with a giggle. “I never thought of singing professionally, ever.”

Success in a talent show encouraged her to trade the bathroom for more public performances. Stepping in as a last-minute act the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik, N.W.T., in 2002, she was seen by some friends of Bjork. Before she knew it, Tagaq was invited to tour and record with the Icelandic pop queen. She wrote and sang on Bjork’s Medulla album and contributed to her soundtrack for Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9. In 2005, Tagaq released her own debut disc, the Bjork-produced Sinaa (Inuktitut for “edge”).

A new Tagaq solo album, Auk (“Blood”), is due out this summer. It finds her working with an array of musicians, including Canadian hip-hop artist Buck 65 and U.S. singer Mike Patton of ’90s rock band Faith No More. “It’s very different from the first album,” she says.

For an artist who keeps such international company, Tagaq remains disarmingly down to earth. I spoke to her on her lunch break from substitute teaching at Cambridge Bay’s elementary school. Her mother is a teacher, and Tagaq teaches, too, whenever she goes back home. “The nine-to-five is like a vacation for me at this point,” she says. “It’s so the opposite of what I do. I love the daily routine, ’cause I don’t get to have that very often.”

Members of Kronos Quartet, from left: John Sherba, Hank Dutt, David Harrington and Jeffrey Zeigler. (Jay Blakesberg/Luminato)

The one thing she doesn’t do on her off time is practise her singing. “I release so much when I’m performing,” she says, “I’m basically puking my heart onto the stage; it’s emotionally and physically very taxing. So when I’m not performing, I’m collecting energy.”

Her pre-show prep, however, would have won Hendrix’s approval. “I find a little bit of whisky right before I go onstage kinda helps,” she says. “I’m pulling my voice to the highest and lowest it can go, and naturally the lower registers will cancel out the really high notes. If I do too much guttural stuff, I won’t be able to hit the high notes. So I’m just really careful with that. That’s why I don’t sing when I’m not performing – it’s just pulling it too far.”

Tagaq’s performances with Kronos are only part of a full evening of northern music by the quartet. The program, also titled Nunavut, has the foursome playing tunes by Icelandic rockers Sigur Ros and Norwegian electrofunk duo Xploding Plastix, as well as Nymphea, a piece by the Finnish experimental composer Kaija Saariaho written for Kronos in the 1980s. For Luminato, the quartet will also debut Scatter, a new piece commissioned by Hurdy-Gurdy, a Swedish techno outfit devoted to exploring the vintage busking instrument from which they take their name. “We just put that one together with them in Berlin,” says Harrington, explaining that Hurdy-Gurdy’s Stefan Brisland-Ferner and Totte Mattsson have recorded a backing track against which Kronos performs live.

Kronos chanced upon Hurdy-Gurdy in the same way it discovered Tagaq –Harrington and his mates have their ears tuned perpetually for new sounds. Over its 35 years, the San Francisco-based ensemble has built a catalogue of recordings and projects that ranks among the most diverse of any living string quartet. It includes work by contemporary composers Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Tan Dun, and collaborations with artists as varied as Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle, American balladeer Tom Waits and Chinese pipa player Wu Man. The quartet’s next project will be with Javanese musician-composer Rahayu Supanggah.

Harrington considers the quartet's embrace of world music to be a kind of artistic diplomacy – especially in light of the current global political situation. "We open many of our programs with music from Iraq right now," he points out, "and we're playing music by Iranian composers, even as our government is trying to pick another fight there. To me, it's important that we be exploring unfamiliar music and unfamiliar cultures." Kronos is far from finished, Harrington adds. "There are all kinds of [musical] areas left to explore. We’re just getting started.”

Kronos Quartet and Tanya Tagaq perform at Toronto’s Luminato festival on June 12 and 13.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.