Meet the Artist: Alex E. Chávez

When migration, memory, and music intertwine, the result is a soundscape that transcends borders. Scholar and artist Alex E. Chávez transforms the themes of his award-winning book Sounds of Crossing into a living, breathing musical journey with Sonorous Present. Blending experimental jazz, traditional Mexican son, R&B, spoken word, and more, Chávez and his collaborators create an improvisatory space where grief and resilience coexist, where poetry and ethnography fuse, and where listening itself becomes a political act. 

Ahead of his performance at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, Chávez shares how the project evolved across four years of creation, global upheaval, and personal loss, ultimately expanding what scholarship and music can mean today.

What core themes or emotions did you hope to capture through Sonorous Present, and how do they build upon the ideas in Sounds of Crossing? 

The project began quite intimately tied to Sounds of Crossing. I first conceived of it as a live musical exploration of the themes and poetics of that award-winning book, namely, borders, migration, and grief. 

How did working with artists from diverse genres like jazz, R&B, and traditional Mexican music shape the final sound and vision of the album? 

This was integral to the collaborative nature of the project. The “final sound,” as it were, is reflective of both the group of people I brought together from a range of communities of musical and artistic practice AND my desire to always push at the creative edges/borders of traditional sounds, which certainly means reaching out to other adjacent influences: experimental jazz to spoken word, Latin American musics, and dance. We were able to uniquely blend these sounds and approaches to come up with something quite special. We try to, of course, remain faithful to the compositions on the album, yet always leave room to breathe; that is, to bring the music to life in different, improvisatory ways. 

Can you describe a moment during the four-year creative process when the project’s direction shifted or deepened significantly? 

Yes. Covid-19. Thematically, the album already touched on my stories of family, personal loss, and grief—all articulated through issues of migration and borders. Yet, when Covid-19 happened, I felt as if we were all—as a community, country, and globally—in mourning. We were all living through an unprecedented collective trauma, a structure of feeling that became a part of the writing and reflection integral to the album’s emotional core. And further, my father also passed in the midst of this roiling context. 

How does Sonorous Present reflect your journey and evolving identity as a scholar and an artist? 

While artistic and scholarly practices are often treated as discrete domains, Sonorous Present manifests robust articulations between heterogeneous modalities with little regard to disciplinary distinctions. In this way, it puts on display the possibilities of multi-modal scholarship and ethnographic songwriting to expand our understanding of what ethnographic processes and arts-based methodologies can achieve—in order to uniquely reimagine what a studio recording should sound like and the forms scholarship should take. I have worked across discrete domains—the academy, the stage, music composition, and scholarly writing—yet at this moment in my career I am now integrating my perspectives and experience more fully.

What does the term “sonorous present” mean to you in the context of today’s cultural and political landscapes? 

Sonorous: capable of sound; in the offing.

Present: occurring now; impermanent; gift.

…yet sonic enactments—in time and space—are never empty considerations, for listening reveals itself as a political act comprising culturally and historically situated modes of attention. And so, then, Sonorous Present—taking on themes of the migration, borders, and their crossings—necessarily brings to the forefront the question of sonic ideologies, or the aural markedness structures through which we hear Latinxs and their experiences: what sounds get marked, what categories of race and place emerge therein, and how do they inform and interplay with how Latinxs are understood as a constituency in the United States.

What does it mean to be heard? What does it mean to be silenced? What does it mean to sound? What does it mean to be the subject of listening and its politics? 

How does the ongoing collaboration with Quetzal Flores influence the storytelling and sonic architecture of the music as you perform the project? 

Quetzal—as producer and musical director—brings to bear his experiences as an activist and artist with years of study and training in an array of Afro-diasporic and Latin American musical styles. With Quetzal, you hear the turmoil and urgency in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles urban rebellion—the swirling social moment out of which Quetzal (as a band) emerges. And you hear an archive of creative exploration, collective memory, and personal history—from Veracruz, Mexico, to Los Angeles, California—binding together the likes of bands like Los Lobos and Ozomatli.

And so, beneath the surface of what we were able to craft exists a well of musical and cultural reference that—with the aid of Quetzal—was always in play, as we both pushed at the edges of traditional sounds and ethnography. We electrified traditional instruments like the guiarra de son; recorded, sampled, and looped the zapateado dance footwork directly from the wooden tarima stomp box; reinterpreted Mexican son rhythms in asymmetrical time signatures; combined traditional instruments with seemingly disparate elements; and incorporated field recordings from my research into the sonic and compositional scaffolding of several songs.

Migration, loss, and mourning are profound topics. How did you balance their heaviness with moments of beauty, resilience, or joy in the music? 

I don’t know that we intentionally thought of striking such a balance—we wrote and created and let the process take us in all manner of directions sonically and thematically. Yet, while the themes are seemingly heavy, we did believe that spaces for mourning are beautiful gifts in themselves and wanted to invite people into that space and find beauty in it.

What role does poetry play in concert—not just lyrically, but structurally or emotionally within the compositions? 

It is a key component of this entire project. Roger Reeves—award-winning poet—contributed from the start, live and in the studio; and coupled with my own writing, we were able to explore a dimension of the creative process that went beyond mere “lyrics,” and rather, into the realm of deep poetic reflection and storytelling. 

Looking ahead, how might Sonorous Present open new pathways for blending scholarship, music, and public storytelling? 

This album is a capacious aesthetic statement that integrates my desires and talents as an artist, scholar, musician, educator, and vessel of tradition. I think it provides a model for, once more, the possibilities of multi-modal scholarship and what ethnographic processes and arts-based methodologies can achieve.

As Chávez reflects, Sonorous Present is more than an album or a performance—it’s an aesthetic statement, a vessel for collective memory, and a call to listen more deeply to the sounds that shape our cultural and political landscapes. Through collaboration with artists across genres, the integration of poetry and field recordings, and the embrace of improvisation, the project offers audiences a rare chance to experience scholarship as song, and music as living ethnography. 

In its urgency and openness, Sonorous Present reminds us that to listen is to bear witness, and to bear witness is itself an act of transformation.