Off the grid: Composer Chris Jonas' 'Music from the Deserts' inspired by secluded places

Finding locations off the beaten path was a source of inspiration for Santa Fe composer and saxophonist Chris Jonas.

His latest project, “Music from the Deserts,” features compositions written by Jonas based on his travels to tucked away places in New Mexico and Arizona. He will perform the new work with his group, the Chris Jonas Quartet, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 18, at Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE, and at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 20, at Paradiso Santa Fe, 903 Early St. in Santa Fe. The quartet features Diné trumpet player Delbert Anderson, bassist Cyrus Campbell and drummer Jonah Minkus.

Off the grid: Composer Chris Jonas' 'Music from the Deserts' inspired by secluded places

The idea to head to desert areas in the southwest was inspired by a friend who suggested Jonas apply for a residency in California’s Death Valley. Jonas applied for the opportunity in January 2021 and was told he would not be notified if he had been accepted to the program until March or later. Jonas decided to venture out on his own and not wait to hear back about the residency.

“I sold my high-efficiency automobile for a Toyota 4Runner and I imagined going to a place where there would be no people and no cell phone service, but it would be in the southern part of New Mexico or Arizona and I could spend a whole month writing music,” he explained. “I’ve raised a daughter successfully. She’s out in the world finally and so I thought this is a really good time for me to do this and get back into the deep practice of composition and see if I’ve still got it.”

Jonas said he found a handful of places in the Southwest that fit the bill.

“I identified three different places in the Southwest that qualified and ultimately I ended up going to, strangely, the (Barry M.) Goldwater missile range in the far southwestern corner of Arizona,” he said. “There’s a sky island there called the Tinajas Altas, which (means) high water jugs in Spanish. And it ended up being a perfect place for me to camp and be in total solitude. And happily, the very first night, the music started coming through. I cooked on a campfire every night, and I was surrounded by wild animals, and had lots of encounters with all sorts of critters, including a swarm of bees that drove me out of camp.”

In addition to being a composer and musician, Jonas also is a filmmaker and runs a multimedia company in Santa Fe called Little Globe.

“I also was determined not only to write music, but also to shoot video that could accompany the music,” he said. “And I ultimately also discovered that there’s such a richness of living in solitude, in the desert, in the wilderness, that the stories of the days that I wrote these pieces, the stories themselves, if combined with video would really enhance people’s imagination about what the music is about.”

He said being in the wilderness led to an unpredictable creative process.

“You don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad,” Jonas said. “You just have to trust that by putting yourself into that space, things will come and you’ll figure out what it means as you go. And so over the course of the past years of COVID, I’ve written dozens and dozens of new pieces. I’ve put those pieces together with videos and stories and have slowly been sharing them with people throughout the United States and also abroad.”

Jonas said it has been a few months since he has been back to the desert. However, the music is still coming through.

“I’ve written a couple of new pieces just last week that I’ll also be premiering, but those pieces were written in southern Colorado and camping in aspen trees,” he said. “It’s kind of about the high alpine stuff. I’ll probably share a couple of the brand-new pieces as well.”

Jonas’ music has been defined as quirky, delicate, weirdly groovy, polyphonic and a mixture of disjointed and melodic.

“It’s kind of an interesting discovery that people just need some means of getting into it and then all of a sudden, just like a movie soundtrack, they can really relax and enjoy the experience,” he explained. “I mean, it’s all of that, but it’s really in some ways the stories and the videos that give you deeper access. That gives me a lot of freedom as composer to write pretty adventurous stuff, the way I would for a movie.”