He wanted to be a jazzman.
One day, while shopping after Thanksgiving, Anderson and his wife rounded a corner and he spotted Nick Lucero, a salesman, with his wife. Both men harbored musical ambitions and loved jazz. “I said, ‘You’re that guy’ and he said, ‘You’re that other guy,’” Anderson recalled. McCluhan, a Deadhead bassist with an appreciation for jazz and jamming, would join them as well.
They played jazz standards at first with a large band. Then a singer wandered off and a guitarist split to labor in the oil fields. “We said to hell with it,” Lucero said, “let’s try a trio.”
Anderson, Lucero and McCluhan have children and bills, and gig money was scant: $80 here, $90 there. “I would blow money on dumb things and come back with $20,” Anderson recalled. “My wife said, ‘This really isn’t going to work.’”
They drew up a business plan even as they grew restless. Why remain a little jazz trio in this remote corner? Anderson wandered into a library in Aztec, N.M., and found a cassette of Navajo spinning songs from the 1920s. He listened and took notes.
“My culture was speaking to me,” he said.
Some Native activists argue it is sacrilege to expose songs of ancestors to the non-Native world. Anderson disagreed and went from elder to elder asking permission to be inspired by these songs. The world of traditional Navajos is not hierarchical, and no single judgment rules.
Elders were generous. “They said, ‘You’re Diné. These songs were ours and now they are yours,’” he recalled. “‘This is your time.’”
Michael Powell
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