Music from Deserts: Chris Jonas featuring Delbert Anderson for Artown

Music from the Deserts is Santa Fe-based composer, saxophonist, and video artist, Chris Jonas' latest project and album. The project explores music and video created while winter camping in the remote Sonora Desert, including Arizona's Barry Goldwater Missile Range and Trump's Border Wall. The sounds explored contain elements of a jazz-based ensemble, but is working with colors and sounds outside traditional jazz, mixing material that is quirky, delicate, polyphonic, weirdly groovy, disjointed, and melodic. The new album is being accompanied by an international tour featuring different ensembles in Santa Fe, NM, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA, and Tuscany, Italy.

Delbert Anderson, a Diné jazz trumpet artist, composer, and educator, stands at the forefront of a vibrant Native American jazz scene. His work, deeply rooted in his Diné heritage, seamlessly integrates Navajo spinning songs of love, healing, and courtship with jazz and funk, thus marking him as a community-minded Indigenous individualist. Through his Delbert Anderson Quartet, Anderson revives the improvised sounds of the Diné circle, blending them with jazz, funk, and hip-hop. His compositions are inspired by Navajo Nation landscapes, historical events, and the desire to preserve and educate about Diné history.