Alex E. Chávez (Dos Santos) Shares Video for "catalina"

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez's debut album, Sonorous Present, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands, as physical place and liminal space. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017)—has been reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores.

Nearly four years in the making, Sonorous Present is a remarkable statement from Chávez—artist, scholar, and borderlands sonic theorist known for his work live and on record with Dos Santos (International Anthem), Caramelo Haze (Nacional Records), Smithsonian Folkways, in addition to collaborations with the legendary Mexican poet and huapango musician Guillermo Velázquez, Grammy Award winners Quetzal and Grupo Fantasma, and members of Grammy Award-nominated Black Pumas and Antibalas. In Sonorous Present, Chávez brings all these roles to bear as he paints affecting scenes in homage to the lives and deaths of his sister, mother, and father. The result is a beautiful and heartbreaking suite that sounds across the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands told through personal stories of migrant crossings, grief, and the politics of our times.

Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds and traditions are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves (Guggenheim fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient). Featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha Gonzalez (2022 MacArthur Fellow), Aloe Blacc (2015 Grammy Award nominee), Ramón Gutiérrez (of Son de Madera), and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso (Winner of the 2022 Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition)—this suite explores an aesthetic terrain that is worlds away from the projects Chávez is most known for.

Along with today’s announcement, the album’s lead single “cómplices de luto” (accomplices in mourning) is now available on all digital music platforms along with a beautiful animated video directed by Estudio Pneuma in collaboration with Celestial Brizuela.

The song features duet vocals by Chávez and Laura Cambrón—lauded son jarocho musician, activist, and veteran of the Los Angeles and Chicago Mexican folk music scenes. A paced huapango rhythm cradles the wistful voices of Cambrón and Chávez, ushered along by Matt Ulery’s whimsical string arrangements, all of which finally crescendos into a melancholic dirge reminiscent of mariachi laments in the tradition of western Mexico’s son de la tierra caliente.

Hauntingly tender and at times cutting, Sonorous Present confidently places Chávez’s songcraft and lyricism on display, highlighting an assured, empathetic voice, as well as his seasoned musicianship and scholarly work. He elaborates the deep and multitudinous possibilities of grief and healing through verse, melody, and ethnographic songwriting. As Roger Reeves explains, “often, we think of elegies as commemorations, as moments of sadness, but really, an elegy is about the praise of something. You can’t mourn something you don’t love.”

Chávez’s first solo album is a tour de force marking a crucial moment in the career of an artist fully integrating all dimensions of his work and talents to reimagine the creative horizons of what a studio album can sound like and the multi-modal forms scholarship can take, all while boldly exploring the sonorous politics of borders.

Sonorous Present is out October 18th, 2024 through Artivist Entertainment.

“Delicate, brief, “catalina” is dedicated to my older sister—Catalina—who was the fatal victim of domestic violence at the age of 18. A song of grief and regret, I lament not being able to say goodbye to her: “inside of me, everything falls apart without you; rather than my own reflection, I see you in the mirror.” I was eleven at the time, and this act of violence and loss deeply shaped my family history and my path as a writer.