Song of Ourselves

 

TIGUEX (A-minus) - What a wonderful ode to an American city.

Albuquerque resident Raven Chacon, originally from the Navajo Nation across the Arizona border, has a worldwide reputation for his musical work. In 2022, Chacon won a Pulitzer Prize for his composition "Voiceless Mass," for organ and ensemble.

In September last year, he took on an epic task. Across 10 hours, he and hundreds of collaborators fanned out across Albuquerque to perform the multi-faceted "Tiguex," a sprawling composition made up of 20 movements performed sequentially from dawn to dusk, from the peak of the Sandia Mountains to the banks of the Rio Grande. It involved more than 200 musicians and vocalists.

 

The movement called "Tiguex" was exhaustively documented, and Chacon now gets credit as director of the 85-minute film presentation of his work. If a film could be both stunning and low-key at the same time, this is it.

The genius of the film -- and the individual pieces crafted by Chacon -- comes in the clear-eyed view of Albuquerque as a city. The depiction is neither fawning nor dismissive. It highlights the simple pleasures of the city -- its gritty landscape, the modest downtown, its Latin traditions, its pioneering role in ballooning -- and finds the heartfelt beauty in all of it, turning the pillars under an interstate into an echo chamber for a soaring cantata. 

There is minimal narration -- from a British-accented host at public radio KUNM-FM, which chronicled the whole day -- as the images unfold. These are some of the scenes we are treated to:

 

A cellist performs along the banks of the Rio Grande in a "Ballad for Two Cellos"; one of the instruments simply floats lazily down the river. Horseback riders lope along the bosque trail. A lone trumpet bookends the film from atop Sandia Peak. A ragtag procession snakes through Old Town. Guitarists and singers jam on a rooftop. Drummers and bassists perform "blast beats" outside a nuclear museum. A mariachi band performs merrily aboard a flatbed trailer. Eight low-riders rev engines and blare sirens along Route 66. A choir on the West Mesa. A trombonist performs solo as a hot-air balloon lifts off from a schoolyard. 

It all culminates in eight singers wandering amid the pillars under I-40 at sunset intoning the ethereal sounds created by Chacon and co-writer Marisa Demarco. It is at this point that you might levitate in the cinema.

I have lived in Albuquerque for 24 years, and this is the adopted metro area I'm familiar with, and the film surely speaks to longtime natives. This ain't the "Breaking Bad" tour. It comes from the perspective of an artist who appreciates the ordinary loveliness of your average city, with its quirks and detours. It de-emphasizes the trite, myopic topics -- the tough weather, the perceived crime issues, the percentage of unused office space  -- and merely walks its streets and trails. Many of the performances feature residents as audience in the mix, making this seem like just another day in the neighborhood. It's quite an understated accomplishment. 

BONUS TRACK

Here is the raw video of the 10-hour presentation, which doesn't do justice to the 85-minute film: