True Colors
For northerners like me, the southwest is desert—dry, dusty, sun-baked. Residents of northern New Mexico, however, know better. It’s classified as an “arid” climate, which means there are more cacti and fewer riding lawn mowers. But the November temperatures—as I discovered—aren’t too different from Wisconsin’s. The landscape and sights, however, are distinctive. Snow from an early snowstorm still lingered in the shade and at high elevations when we arrived a couple of weeks ago. But the occasional patches of white didn’t detract from the vibrant palette of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. The sky seemed bluer, the houses earthier, the food and clothing more vivid. See for yourself. Click on each photo to enlarge and see the full description.
Dark Winds
By heritage, Tony Hillerman is Euro-American through and through (his grandparents were from England and Germany), but he grew up in Oklahoma and attended school with the area’s native children. That might explain the vibrant portraits of Native American life and culture in his novels.
The series draws on the landscape formerly known as Monument Valley for its moody mise en scène.
Hillerman’s embrace of native culture and traditions certainly attracted Graham Roland (a member of the Chickasaw Nation), the showrunner of the Netflix series, Dark Winds. Based on Hillerman’s novels about Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), the series is steeped in the Navajo landscape and accented with tribal traditions and language.
Zach McClarnon as Joe Leaphorn in Dark Winds.
The stories in the first two seasons (season three is in the works) are drawn from HIllerman’s novels, Listening Woman and People of Darkness. Leaphorn and Chee investigate cult-ish cabals and conspiracies in the Navajo nation. They butt up against federal and state law enforcement (the Navajo nation has its own force) and deal with their own personal trials. It’s a striking flip of the dynamic in traditional Westerns, with John Wayne patrolling that iconic landscape to protect settlers from invading tribes. We now know that the Manifest Destiny iconography of “Monument Valley,” so common to the landscape of John Ford Westerns, is actually “Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park,” part of the Navajo Nation.
It’s a dramatic vista, but the defining landscape of the series is the face of McClarnon, a study in tortured intensity. Leaphorn is haunted by the death of his son in a mining explosion, and McClarnon offers a fresh take on the emotionally scarred lawman driven to find justice. Season three of Dark Winds is scheduled for release on AMC in March, 2025.
Down the Silk Road
The Silk Road Ensemble performing “American Railroad.”
In 1998, Yo-Yo Ma formed the Silk Road Ensemble because he believed the world could learn something from a collective of musicians from different world music traditions. The group’s artists and choice of music reflected the 4000-mile trade route that spanned Europe, Asia and eastern Africa from the time of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance. With Ma as its leader, the group toured extensively and released ten albums, including the soundtrack to Ken Burns 2017 series The Vietnam War.
In 2022, Rhiannon Giddens assumed leadership of the group, and its first project came to Chicago earlier this month to start the second half of a national tour. American Railroad revolves around the peoples affected by the building of the so called transcontinental rail line (it actually ran from Council Bluffs, Iowa to San Francisco) completed in 1869. With striking projections of the era’s photographs, the group played an eclectic collection of music developed at workshops around the country.
Rhiannon Giddens and Sandeep Das.
Pura Fé, an indigenous singer-songwriter of the Tuscarora and Taino nations, sang “Mahk Jchi” (“Our Hearts”), a gentle cry for preserving the natural world. Sandeep Das, a master of the tabla, performed “Rela,” an homage to railroad workers on the Indian subcontinent that used the complex rhythms of Indian music to evoke the clatter of a steam engine. With Giddens as director, there was plenty of soulful blues, including a rollicking arrangement of the classic song, “John Henry,” preceded by Giddens singing a beautiful, a capella version of “Swannanoa Tunnel,” named for a North Carolina train tunnel built by imprisoned black laborers.
By expanding its scope to include music traditions of indigenous people and African Americans, Giddens has added something special to the Silk Road ethos. It’s striking to hear the assertive bleat of Chinese suona (a double reed instrument that sounds like a very loud oboe, played by Yazhi Guo) and the West African, marimba-like balafon (played by Balla Kouyaté) blending into an ensemble that includes tradition Western violin and cello. Sometimes pungent, somethings silky, it nonetheless speaks to harmony and community.
Speaking of Community….
The New Yorker’s “Critics at Large,” my current go-to podcast, greeted the election with a trenchant episode entitled: “The Value—and Limits—of Seeking Comfort in Art.” More on the meat of that discussion in a future week. But one of the “critics,” Vinson Cunningham, offered a song, Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We'll All Be Free,” that will surely resonate with many Americans—as it did over 50 years ago.
Sunset
Eight miles west of Taos, New Mexico, the Rio Grande cuts a deep gorge spanned by a bridge 650 feet above the river. You can hike south along the west side of the gorge for a stunning view of Taos nestled at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. And if you’re there at the right time of day, you can watch the shadow line climb up the opposite wall of the gorge and over the wide plain of the town, eventually bathing the mountains in a warm glow, then covering them in shadow against the still glowing sky. Click on each photo for a larger image.
Have a good week.