The canyon's voice

Lots of people have played music in Canyon de Chelly, probably back to the Anasazi. A few people have recorded music in the canyon.

But this week marked probably the first time someone has played, recorded and edited a complete music project entirely in the canyon.

Canyon de Chelly is the latest stop for itinerant musician/producer Dean De Benedictis in the ongoing project he calls "Travels Rendered." Living out of his car, De Benedictis is going to places that have inspired him, and giving them a voice.

"It's sort of a musical take on the way Van Gogh and other classical painters used to take their canvas to a place and work on it," De Benedictis explained.

Instead of a canvas, De Benedictis brings his laptop, a microphone and some speakers. It's both his instrument and his recording studio.

Recording natural sounds like water gurgling or the wind, De Benedictis mixes in manufactured sounds he creates on his computer using music software. The computer can mimic any instrument, but it can also create other sounds - metallic tinkling, whooshes, not-quite-human sighs and groans.

If De Benedictis sees a sunbeam tickling ripples in a pond, for example, he imagines a sound for it.

"Everything I see and experience becomes a sound metaphor," he said.

Sometimes De Benedictis works alone, other times he incorporates an interesting local musician he meets along the way. In the case of Canyon de Chelly, one part of its voice is 30-year-old Diné flutist Donovan "D'Von" Charley.

Charley can usually be found at one of the canyon's overlooks, playing his wooden flute with his CDs spread out on a rock, waiting for tourists to bite.

He liked De Benedictis right away, but didn't really understand what he was talking about until they started recording.

"I thought, 'This is kind of like what I'm doing when I'm sitting in the canyon playing my flute,'" Charley said. "I always let the canyon inspire my music. It never comes out the same way twice."

Still, Charley had seen bilagáanas come and go, and after a few initial tracks they recorded last May, he wasn't sure De Benedictis would be back.

"I thought it was just a little thing that he did for fun," he recalled. "Then I started looking him up on the Internet and I was like, 'Whoa! This guy's serious.'"

De Benedictis returned to finish the project last week, and found a whole different canyon. Snow flurries swirled against the red rock, and the flowing wash he had hoped to record was a trail of silent ice. Both his and Charley's fingers rapidly became numb in the subfreezing air, and sessions had to be limited to a couple of hours.

But the magic of what De Benedictis calls "ambient music" is that you capture what's there.

Capturing what's there

About noon on Monday, the two men and Charley's girlfriend Natasha Wagner - also the videographer for this particular part of the project, which De Benedictis hopes to make into a documentary film - drove to the Massacre Cave overlook and climbed a short way into the canyon to a protected shelf overlooking an Anasazi ruin.

De Benedictis set up his stuff - it didn't take long - and Charley retrieved two flutes from beneath his jacket.

One would think they would find only sad spirits to work with at this place where 115 Navajos - mostly women and children - were felled by Spanish bullets in 1805. But after taking a few deep breaths and walking around a bit, Charley pronounced it a place of feminine strength.

"It makes me think of our brave Navajo women," he said, noting that it was a woman who couldn't resist taunting the Spaniards, inadvertently revealing the Tséyiniis' hiding place, and another woman who wrestled with a Spaniard who had managed the steep descent to the rocky ledge where the Diné were entrenched. Both the woman and the soldier fell from the ledge to their deaths, giving the area its Navajo name, "The Place Where Two Fell Off."

But on a recent Monday the cold and the beauty of the diagonally stacked rock layers, outlined in white, eclipsed the area's tragic history. After blowing some warmth into his fingers, Charley began to play. De Benedictis followed his lead, backing him up with gauzy sighs and whispers he coaxed from an electronic keyboard plugged into his MacBook.

Occasionally, Charley would stop playing, perhaps to preserve his fingers, and do a birdcall or sing a fragment from a Navajo song.

Amazingly, the impromptu session was the finished product - and it was beautiful. The cold, the swirling flurries, the sun occasionally peeking through the clouds - it was all in the music. Although Charley and De Benedictis are of different races and separated by 13 years of age, they were translating their experience into the same language.

On a ledge below the ruin, a canyon wren hopped out from behind a rock and cocked his head toward the unfamiliar, or maybe familiar, sounds emanating from the rim. Charley said later the sound of the wooden flute often attracts birds.

Using only eye contact, the two musicians agreed on a stopping point. Shivering but happy, they collected their equipment and climbed back to the rim, where a chill wind had whipped up.

"That was really good," said Charley.

"One of our best yet," agreed De Benedictis.

Back in the car, they weren't even warm yet before they started discussing their next venue in the canyon.

"You guys are serious," observed the reporter, trying to shake some life into her frozen pen.

"You know," responded De Benedictis, "Some people believe in aliens. Some people believe in God. Some people say they love music. Some people love art. But how much do you love it? How seriously do you take it?

"If you love something, go be a part of it. People should be proactive about what they love."

Information: summitmusicproject.blogspot.com. De Benedictis is also planning on setting up a Facebook site and a Web page for the "Travels Rendered" project.

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