Farmington, New Mexico — Driving the high desert roads of northern New Mexico is about navigating mountain passes, red-rock mesas, dry river streams, and remote, vast Navajo mountains. Finding hogans, settlements and flocks of sheep.

Messing around with the car radio dials while I’m there usually produces nothing but static electricity. Except one day, when the station played a haunting ballad, you could hear the silky, soulful trumpets. “Narbona” In unmistakable Navajo phrasing.

The song was handmade by delbert anderson trioand felt as if born out of this fold of land.

Delbert Anderson, 36, is a Navajo jazz musician who and his band members live in Farmington, a city the size of the Republic of Ireland with a population of 46,000, just east of the reservation where he was born. I’m in. The trio’s drummer, Nick Lucero, 39, is half Quechua Peruvian half Spanish and grew up on a ranch in Colorado. Bassist Michael McLuhan, his tall, bearded 55-year-old Anglo, former competitive swimmer, never wandered off.

A musician’s life is a tumbleweed journey here. This trio faces long drives to gigs and airports, meandering between peaks and prairies that are home to elk, mountain lions and coyotes. “It’s a shaky, weird little town,” Anderson laughed in an interview last fall at their studio in downtown Farmington. “The advantage is that you can afford to be a jazz musician.”

After performing at country fairs, art centers and bars, splitting the meager income and staring sadly at his wife, Anderson and his bandmates seem poised for something big.

By mining traditional Navajo “spinning songs” of love, healing and courtship and combining them with jazz and funk lines, Anderson and his trio are at the forefront of the vibrant Native American jazz scene. standing inThey stand by Nez Perse singer Julia Keef — Jazz vocalist Songbird, who is also a big band frontman — and Wabanaki bassist, composer and vocalist Mari Obonsawin.

Last October, the Delbert Anderson Trio flew to Johannesburg to play at the World of Music, Arts and Dance. womad, a festival founded by Peter Gabriel. While there, the trio worked with South African artists on their next album Kindred Spirits, produced by South African Grammy Award winner John Lindemann.

The haunting single “Grandma’s Song” will be released on March 8th. Written and composed in Navajo by Alex Rose Her Holliday, the song features intense performances by Anderson’s trio, and Ndebele singer Nelisiwe Her Mutweni contributes with sharp vocals. Her two languages, Navajo and Ndebele, were once all but banned by the Conquistadors.

An indigenous lineage that runs through the history of jazz. Black stars like Charlie Parker and Don Cherry were part of the Choctaw.Miles Davis had Cherokee heritage. Saxophonist Jim Pepper was of the Cow and Muskogee Creek, and several of his compositions featured Native American choruses.

Still, few associate Native Americans with jazz. And those on the scene face a battle over Indigenous identity and the perceived duty of Indigenous artists to participate in the struggle for justice.

“Indigenous activists say we need to indigenize and take over these showcases,” said Anderson, wide-eyed only slightly. “He has seven family members who are expecting a check when he gets home.

Anderson and his bandmates now rely on relatively generous grants to collaborate with dancers, painters, photographers and classical musicians. And they became jazz evangelists. Anderson’s passion is bringing his music to Navajo children.

On a clear September day, Anderson and Lucero drove west toward the 9,000-foot limestone peaks of the Chusca Mountains, which divide the New Mexico and Arizona sides of the Navajo Reservation.

After pulling over to the small Cove Day Public Elementary School to find 50 Navajo children sitting in the auditorium, Anderson performed. I howled and sighed. Slowly, he pulled out a smile and a laugh.

Cove Elementary School in Arizona is in a lot of beauty and a lot of hardship. The school overlooks the Red Mesa, Butte and Ponderosa Forest. On the same land, an abandoned uranium mine has been found. Another school nearby has a well and you can cough by spitting out of the tap.

Anderson has aunts, uncles, and cousins ​​who live in this Dineh world as the Navajo know them.

“I’m a lesbian boy,” Anderson said after pulling to a Navajo roadside fried bread, onion and mutton stand, speckled with enough green pepper to make me cry. It’s a tough life.”

in the 1980s, Anderson’s grandfather, a Navajo steeped in traditional culture, told his son: Delbert’s family moved to Farmington, where his father worked in the oil fields.

In fourth grade, Anderson saw a jazz combo on stage in his elementary school auditorium. Finally, the musician with the trombone closed the scorebook, leaned back, and let go. “Oh my god!” he remembered. “He was just crying.”

Anderson was bet. He tried the trombone, but his small lungs couldn’t produce the squeaky sound. He picked up the trumpet. “People kept saying I couldn’t be a jazzman,” he said. “I knew they were wrong.”

He listened obsessively to recordings by trumpeters like Lee Morgan and Davis to develop his rich tone. A university professor turned him towards classical music. He went back to improvising. “The faculty were like, ‘Can we pass this guy?'” he said.

Friends suggested Anderson work in the oil fields. Cash was plentiful and that was the job of the Navajo. he said no.

he wanted to be a jazzman.

One day, while shopping after Thanksgiving, Anderson and his wife turned a corner and spotted Nick Lucero, a salesman, with his wife. Both had musical ambitions and loved jazz. “I said, ‘You’re that guy,’ and he said, ‘You’re another guy,'” recalls Anderson. Deadhead bassist McLuhan, who loved jazz and jamming, joined them.

They first played jazz standards with a large band. Then the singer wandered off and the guitarist parted ways to work in the oil fields. “We went to hell with that,” Lucero said, “let’s try the trio.”

Anderson, Lucero, and McLuhan had kids, bills, and gig money. $80 here, $90 there. “I blew my money on ridiculous things and came back with $20,” recalled Anderson. “My wife said, ‘This is really not going to work,’ she said.”

Despite their restlessness, they worked out a business plan. Why remain a small jazz trio in this secluded corner? Anderson wandered into a library in Aztec, New Mexico, and found a cassette of 1920s Navajo songs. He listened and took notes.

“My culture has spoken to me,” he said.

Some Native activists argue that exposing ancestral songs to the non-Native world is blasphemy. Anderson disagreed and went from elder to elder asking permission to be inspired by these songs. The traditional Navajo world is non-hierarchical and has no single rule of thumb.

The elders were generous. “They said, ‘You’re Diné. These songs were ours, but now they’re yours,'” he recalled. “‘This is your time.'”

The band started breathing and making music differently. There were cringe-worthy moments, like when a Texas trade fair promoter worried that a snazzy Anderson in a suit didn’t look “native” enough. The promoter put a feather on the musician’s head.

But for the most part, their music slowly opened up the world.

In 2014, the trio released “Manitou”.,” A debut album that incorporates rotating songs into a polyphonic feast. The group then teamed up with Navajo rapper Christopher Mike Vida (also known as Def-i), jumped in his car, and drove through the high desert to write the lyrics. His 2018 album DDAT, the result, is a new takeoff, blending rap, jazz, his Navajo sound, and his Latin rhythms.

What they want now is “to bring the native sound back to jazz,” Anderson said.

3 years ago, Anderson’s trio landed in New York City for a showcase — 15 minutes to show the chops to a booking agent. In their culture, flamboyant self-esteem is not rewarded. “Nick tells me not to apologize for myself,” said Anderson. “My lesbian is coming out.”

Anderson jammed sessions around the city with his trumpet during that trip. He listened to musicians tapping high notes and acrobatic notes with Keen.Each player was Dizzy or Coltrane.It was hard. “Honestly, I felt like I was one of the least talented players out there,” he said.

Steve Greenberg of the booking agency and music consultancy Musicworks International voluntarily mentored the trio. He brushed off Anderson’s masochistic recollections.

Greenberg said in an interview, “I told Delbert to forget the guys with the pyrotechnics.” I played the note I wanted.

“You have a soulful sound and your artistry is deepening.”

Last summer, Anderson’s trio toured with the Painted Mountains Tour as Artists in Residence for the Bureau of Land Management. Working with indigenous singer and lyricist James Pacutas of the Colville Confederated Tribes, the band performed at Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado and Kings in California.・I visited the range. Musicians sought out native elders, asked about their ancient stories, and incorporated them into original songs.

They performed outdoor concerts and through their cooperation began to heal the centuries-old wounds between the federal agency and the indigenous peoples.

South Africa felt similarly transformed when they traveled to Soweto and met indigenous musicians from Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand.

“There was a stitch between music and language,” said Christina Jacobsen, a songwriter and anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who accompanied them. “This is what it means to play her language one word or song at a time.”

Last September, they loaded up in a van and drove 16 hours overnight for a gig in Sonoma, California. McLuhan shrugged into yawning distance. “Have some coffee and be honest when you’re tired and take a nap,” he said. “Simple.”

This group has plan upon plan: a famous residency, an opera, an album, a musical, perhaps in Mongolia, the place where the Navajo tribes welcomed before embarking on their millennia-long journey to the American Southwest. A trip to a purring jazz festival. Funders advised the trio to consider relocating to Los Angeles or New York.

The men stepped back.

“I have six kids and a wife and I’m going to look for a house?” Anderson said. “How does it work?”

“I know Navajos who choose life over family,” he added. “Oh, we broke up, oh, we got divorced.” I don’t want to be that kind of native. I don’t want to be that stereotype. I want to put it all together, take joy in my art, and be the person who changes my world.