Friday, February 11, 2022, at Hotel Congress. The sidewalk outside of the venue was lined with all types of characters, but most had the vibe of ’70s hippies with a much more sophisticated sense of fashion. The small bar in the lobby of the venue was slightly less crowded than on a typical Friday night at the Hotel Congress, but the front room was packed, with around 200 people in attendance. Opening band Divino Nino, from Chicago, played a wide range of styles throughout their set, starting with a psychedelic slow jam and ending with a funky number that had the room hopping.
Inner Wave. Front left: guitarist Elijah Trujillo; back left: keyboardist José Cruz; center: lead vocalist and guitarist Pablo Sotelo; rear: drummer Luis Portillo; right: bassist and vocalist Jean Pierre Narvaez. Photo by Jake Ward.
Inner Wave, a band from Los Angeles, took the stage, highlighting songs from their new album Apoptosis, recorded during the quarantine in 2020 and recently released. The energy level in the room turned up a notch as the band started its set strong. The guitars, synth, and drums flowed together in perfect symphony, while the vocals carried over them seamlessly. The band sounded the same performing live as they do on record, which is an impressive feat in a world of auto-tune. The crowd was enjoying every moment of it, and the band was, too, playing as if for old friends when in fact it was its first ever appearance in Tucson. The sounds had couples and groups dancing until the very end of the show—which, we hope, won’t be their last performance here.
See here for a documentary of the making of Inner Wave’s newest.
“Pandemic blues again, life in lockdown / Don’t let your hope, your driving force / Drag on the ground.” So writes Jay Farrar in “These Are the Times,” two years into a worldwide plague that, he adds, has us “walking backwards.” One of many highlights on the new Son Volt album Electro Melodier, the song speaks to Farrar’s guarded optimism that, as he puts it elsewhere on the album, “the worst will soon be over.”
Electro Melodier began as a classic Covid album, assembled, as so many are these days, with musicians recording in different studios, one Son Volt member from as far away as New York, most of the others closer to Farrar’s home base of St. Louis. But something was missing in the distance, he says, and as time went on and the album inched along, “we all masked up and played together.” There’s an agreeably live feel to the album, one that hits the ground running with the upbeat, aptly titled “Reverie,” which encourages its listeners not to “stop dreaming on a distant star.” The album continues in a similar spirit, though with a couple of more pensive moments, one of them the song “War on Misery,” which, Farrar says, “I wanted to sound something like Lightnin’ Hopkins, with a low-tuned guitar and some quiet spaces.”
In a sense, Farrar tells Zócalo, the pandemic was a boon, if in just one regard: by taking the band off the road and constant live performing, it gave him and his bandmates the time to work hard on crafting an album that holds together as a piece. Even so, he allows, he’s glad to be going out on tour again after nearly two years away, a tour that will see the band’s return to Tucson after several years on top of the pandemic-born hiatus.
Electro Melodier, says Farrar, came together well overall, though one song, he says good-naturedly, was a little like pulling teeth. A slow march with pensive lyrics about the big lies in the face of the “truth we all know,” it “started to veer off in a direction that was sort of like the band Rush. We had to dial it back a bit to keep it from going off into prog-rock territory.” It’s now safely back in the Americana pocket that Farrar helped pioneer, another standout in an album that never falters.
Son Volt at 191 Toole, Wednesday, January 19, at 8pm. $25 via Ticketmaster or at the door. Proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test within the previous 48 hours is required for admission, and masks must be worn.
It’s almost impossible to write about Lisa Morales and her upcoming show on the Hotel Congress patio without writing/talking about her sister and lifelong singing partner, Roberta, who succumbed to a three-year battle with cancer a scant three months ago. “It’s still hard,” she said in a recent phone interview as she prepares for her first tour since the advent of Covid.
“I was with her in the hospital every day for three months, after the initial diagnosis,” she said. Following chemo and radiation, “she fought, and she won, for a while. We were hoping she might sing on the [new] album. Obviously, it’s still pretty raw.”
Native Tucsonans and members of the extended Ronstadt clan, Lisa says, “we knew we had something special since we were little girls when our father used to take us to sing at La Fuente [on Oracle Road] with the mariachis.” In time, as their individual musical personas developed, Roberta eventually joined Lisa’s already established band, and their new group, Sisters Morales, was born. Relocating to San Antonio, where they set up shop, they recorded six albums and toured the world. Their unique blend of homegrown Arizona/Tex-Mex, fueled by their original compositions and stellar harmonies, melded roots steeped in traditional Mexican music with a contemporary flair for Americana and blues. This original brand of Southwest gumbo, so hard to define but so easy to love, made them a must-see act on the road and festival circuit throughout the country and abroad.
While their visits to Tucson were too few and far between, they did play a memorable show the El Casino Ballroom in the early 2000s while also headlining the Tucson Folk Festival in 2005. Following the death of their mother in 2011, the sisters decided it was time to part ways musically, although, “of course, we were still very close.”
Since then, Lisa has produced two solo albums and is on the cusp of releasing a third, She Ought to be King, due out next spring. In its first single, “Freedom,” Morales sings about the power of loving each other as a mother does and speaking up when we see injustices. “It’s a very simple message,” she says. “Love one another, be kind, do the right thing, be honorable and help one another.”
Musically, “Freedom” retains a percussive Latin feel, although it’s not like anything one would associate with the sisters. Clearly her growth as an artist continues to be reflected in her solo work. It’s a ride that has allowed her to rub elbows with everyone from Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys to Rodney Crowell. “Freedom” also boasts the services of original Santana and Journey alum Gregg Rolie on keyboards and backing vocals.
When she takes the stage at Hotel Congress, it will be the second show of a tour that follows a hiatus dating back to early 2020 and a welcome reprieve from a series of Zoom and other online offerings. In dedicating this show to Roberta, Lisa will be fronting a four- or five-piece band in a homecoming that no doubt will be as comforting as it may be bittersweet.
The Lisa Morales Band plays the Hotel Congress outdoor patio on Saturday, November 13, at 8:00 pm. Doors open at 7:30. Tickets are $20 general admission, $25 reserved.
“You can’t be young and do that.” So writes James McMurtry, closing in on 60, in the first song on his new album The Horses and the Hounds. You can’t be young only because it takes decades to live up to the vision of that song, “Canola Fields,” which takes in dozens of years and thousands of miles, speaking of love, fear, mortality, and wandering, among other things, and that has a stoic feel to it, as if to say, sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t.
McMurtry’s expansive vision comes naturally: he’s a Texan who looks out on a big horizon, after all, and his father was the noted novelist and part-time Tucsonan Larry McMurtry. Many of the younger McMurtry’s songs have a 30,000-foot view of things, whether he’s writing of the country folk who wind up going off to fight America’s secret wars—we don’t know about them, he notes, because they’re not on TV—or of a border rider who shoots his best friend for reasons we can only guess at. The songs are evocative of dusty, windy places, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, always memorable.
The Horses and the Hounds, McMurtry says, isn’t exactly a COVID album. Most of the tracks were laid down a couple of years ago. COVID, of course, got in the way of everything all the same. “I couldn’t go out and play for more than a year,” he says, “so I worked on the recording some more.” The result is a richly layered work that often sounds like—well, a horse trying to kick down the gate and head for the field, impatient and onrushing. Listen to “What’s the Matter,” a song that answers its own question, and its blaze of guitars and stomping drums, and you’ll get a sense of his impatience to get the show rolling again. (“Oh, yeah,” McMurtry adds, “and I had five different keyboard players, all of ’em on B-3!”)
James McMurtry will perform songs from his new album on September 5 at the Hotel Congress Plaza (311 E. Congress). For the vaxxed and masked—others need not apply, and proof of vaccination is required—McMurtry’s solo show will begin at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20 in advance or at the door.
Bruce McGrew painting on the California coast. Photograph by William Pitt Root.
Bruce McGrew had an immersive approach to teaching art—many of his students felt a vigorously personal pull toward him, an orbit that closely cemented relationships. In interviews in 2006 and 2007, Rick DeMont recalled the power the “McGrew effect” had on him. “I got to U of A as a junior, majoring in art, and one of my first classes was with Bruce—I found him fascinating—he spoke in parables and riddles, like a poet, and in his speech, there was always something between the lines, and it just tuned me in. I was very curious to learn more about this guy—I knew I wanted to know what he knew—there’d never before been a person like that for me, in art or out of art. I had no idea what his art was like. I just knew I wanted to know what he knew, because he knew, and I knew he knew. As abstract as that may sound, that was how it hit me, and from that point on, moments with him were in many ways magic—that’s what he was all about—magic. I don’t know what he thought of me as a student—but that was the beginning of a pretty long relationship.”
“I was already very much of a landscape person when I got there, and I was more into oils at that time, too, but he got me painting outside, and it wasn’t long until I was painting with him outside—I don’t know exactly for how many months. I was also taking classes with [Doug] Denniston, who was also a plein air guy. This was the spring of 1977. When I saw Bruce’s paintings, I was like, ‘Okay, here’s something that adds up to way more than its pieces.’ It still gives me goosebumps to talk about it, because I was so profoundly affected by it visually, and I couldn’t get his paintings out of my head probably for ten or fifteen years. It was just to the point where, ‘Let me exorcise these images, so I can move on with life.’”
Bruce McGrew, “Irish Coast.” Photograph by Rebecca Hamilton
“Bruce was really tactical about his approach and where he wanted you to go and what he thought maybe you should be open to. He was pretty delicate—it was the velvet hammer. As soon as I graduated, I moved to the ranch. That was 1979, and so what happened next—I sold this big oil painting at the Gekas Nicholas Gallery. It gave me more money than I thought I deserved, and I took that money and went out to the ranch to live and try to paint, and my life kind of developed from there. I was there for eight years. I loved living out there, but … I realized I would come out with nothing but a great place to live—I needed a little bit more than that, so that was why I left. I came into town, bought a house and started my own thing.”
DeMont’s affection and admiration for McGrew reflect the nearly infectious charisma he had with seemingly everyone he engaged. “Any day with Bruce was just a fantastic day, watching the time pass. He could bring magic into eating food or just walking down the road. He’d just break things down to its core essence, and he lived his life that way, day in and day out, walking around in the core essence. He could find beauty in anything, in any place. And time—he was very connected to that spirit, whatever you wanna call it—the core essence are good words. Maybe some guys would call it bones. I’ve never met a person who was more real than Bruce McGrew—it’s the opposite of hokey. It’s the other direction, floored as far as the road goes.
Excerpted from Paul Gold, Bend in the Wash: The Rancho Linda Vista Artist Community (Tubecat LLC). The book is available for sale at http://interstice.us/paul-gold/index.htm. It is also available at Deadwood Framing and the Tucson Museum of Art.
For the last 10 years, performances by the Zoppé Family Circus have been a much-loved and much-anticipated treat. Playing to packed houses and wowing kids and adults alike, the artists of Zoppé work with traditions that date back to the Circus’s founding in Italy in 1842.
This year’s run, however, reflects the new and current reality of 2020/21, and so the extravaganza has been reborn at the Zoppé Family Circus Drive-In. Instead of sitting under the big-top tent, the 2021 circus will allow audiences to enjoy the circus from the safety of their own vehicles, while the performers can be seen on an elevated stage and circus ring, as well as displayed live on large LED screens. Sound will be broadcast through car stereos, just like a traditional drive-in movie theater on FM radio, with minimal sound coming from the stage. The circus family will be welcoming cars for half an hour before each show, including an old-fashioned circus parade through the cars. Performers and acts for this year’s Circus include high-flying gymnastics, acrobatics, and feats of strength, all under the watchful eye of ringmaster Mace Perlman. Shows will run between January 15 and January 31. For tickets and showtimes, please visit the Mercado’s website.
It seems hardly believable that 10 years have passed since the event that has come to be known, blandly, as “the Tucson Shootings” occurred. Yet 10 years have indeed gone bye, and with them the world has changed. For one small measure, Gabrielle Giffords’s husband, Mark Kelly, now represents Arizona in the United States Senate, part of a political transformation that would have been hard to foresee in 2011. For another, we have become increasingly aware that something urgently needs to be done to curb the violence that so radically changed Gabby’s life, and ours with it.
But much remains the same. We face a novel plague, but we also battle three interlocked epidemics that have long been with us: a surge in untreated mental illness, courtesy of the so-called libertarians who scorn spending public money on those in most need; a general mood of free-floating rage, often politically oriented, as is evident by the scenes playing out at the Capitol even as I write; and a flood in the number of weapons specifically meant to kill humans, thanks to the ministrations of the NRA and other tools of the gun manufacturing lobby. We cannot let this anniversary go by without observing that almost nothing has been done about any of these scourges—and that until it is there will be other shootings, other victims, other vigils.
We invite you to join us as we revisit some of the moments that followed the Tucson Shootings, marked by a suite of photographs of events surrounding the shootings and their aftermath. Please visit our issue of February 2011, also found at the bottom of this portfolio.
—Gregory McNamee
Ringed with police tape, the Safeway at Ina and Oracle where the shootings occurred stands empty. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.As seen on January 12, 2011, a makeshift memorial near the Safeway where the shootings took place. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.At the Safeway entrance. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.The marquee of the Fox Theatre expresses the feelings of the community. Photograph by David Olsen.President Barack Obama delivers a powerful speech at Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting, heavily attended by national media figures such as Lester Holt of NBC. Photograph by David Olsen.The UMC memorial at night. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.Memorial outside of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s office in Tucson, a few days after the shootings.Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords being transported to a medical air transport for travel to Houston, Texas. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
The EMTs who responded to the shooting, attend Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Peter Rhee, the attending trauma physician for Congresswoman Giffords, attends Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona. Photograph by David Olsen.Ron Barber and family on stage at the March 10, 2011 benefit concert for the Fund for Civility, Respect, and Understanding, in support of the individuals and families affected by the Jan. 8 shootings. Photograph by David Olsen.Scenes from the March 10, 2011 benefit concert for the Fund for Civility, Respect, and Understanding, in support of the individuals and families affected by the Jan. 8 shootings: Jackson Browne and Joey Burns. Below Alice Cooper; Graham Nash and David Crosby. Photographs by David Olsen.The first anniversary of the Tucson Shootings is commemorated at the University of Arizona on January 8, 2012. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.The permanent memorial erected at the Safeway as seen on the eighth anniversary in 2019. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
This December all live theater and dance events are canceled in Tucson, but you can still take in the Nutcracker at El Toro Flicks drive-in theater (198 S. Granada Ave., 520 449 4468).
On December 21, Danswest Dance Company presents a new, original staging of the classic ballet. Written and directed by Danswest owner and professional tap dancer Megan Maltos, Not Your Ordinary Nut features dancers aged 7–18, plus a few courageous dance dads. NYON is entirely choreographed by Tucson artists, three of whom grew up dancing at Danswest.
The show incorporates elements of all of Danswest’s styles—ballet, yes, but also acrobatics, tap dancing, jazz, even hip hop, and plenty of heart. The dancers had six weeks to learn the choreography before it was filmed in October. Danswest will offer two screenings at 6:00 pm and 9:30 pm. Tickets are $40 a carload. For more information, contact Megan.maltos@gmail.com, (520) 240–2476.
Covid has provided a strange opportunity for reflection, which can be both therapeutic and confusing. I find myself exploring both of these characteristics in the music I’ve been making since. “Cycling,” released late last month, is an exploration of the way things change and the feelings that either go with that change or resist it. Habits are very hard to break, but if 2020 has taught me anything it is that we, as humans, are adaptable. We do change. We’ve changed the way we view community and politics and justice. This, despite the horrible moments of this year, is actually quite inspiring to me. I hope to be releasing more music throughout the remainder of this year and into next. “Cycling” and my full-length album are available on all platforms.
The local-food movement is built on flavor, nutrition, and freshness. But it is also built on story and a sense of place. The word “heritage” feeds our longing for a feeling of rootedness. White Sonoran wheat has a great story, and that has led to its charisma. Throughout the country, though, grains have been slower to join the lineup of reintroduced foods than other heritage seeds because unlike a vegetable like a squash, which can be picked and eaten quickly, wheat involves additional processing to become food.
The introduction of spring wheat (also called winter wheat) by the Spanish missionaries in the 1690s was a most welcome addition to the food cycle of local native people. We can assume that the Spanish brought several kinds of wheat seeds, but it was the spring wheat that adapted to local conditions best and made the most impact. By March, the Tohono O’odham granaries of stored foods, such as mesquite, were empty, and the early populations were getting hungry, awaiting the plants that would be available later in the spring. But the various varieties of wheat we now call White Sonora and Pima Club could be planted in the fall or winter in our mild climate and take advantage of the winter rains. Some of the crop was harvested green in the spring, just when the people needed food the most. They prepared the grain by roasting it over coals. The rest was ripe by May, having by then turned into golden fields.
At first the wheat crop didn’t produce as well as the native corn, but over the next hundred years the farmers learned how to grow it more successfully, and the White Sonora and Pima Club wheat yielded twice as much food as did the fields planted with corn.
The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.
By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.
The 1920s and 1930s were the beginning of the Green Revolution, which advocated increasing grain yields through the application of copious amounts of water and high nitrogen fertilizer. White Sonora wheat did not thrive under those conditions. Mill technology also changed, making it more difficult to grind the soft, powdery wheat berries, which tended to absorb water.
The market also changed. Soft wheat varieties like White Sonora are used for crackers, cookies, biscuits, and pie crusts. Bakeries were producing more bread, and what they wanted was the hard-red wheat. As a result, the soft heritage wheats fell out of favor. Then came the closing of many flour mills in Sonora due to a multitude of economic factors. It was a downward spiral, because without a means to get their grain ground, more farmers quit growing it.
In 2012, Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson nonprofit seed bank specializing in arid-land heritage seeds, was awarded a two-year grant from the USDA’s Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to reintroduce into sustained production two heritage grains with historical presence and good potential for adaptation in the arid Southwest: White Sonora wheat and Chapalote flint corn.
Today the heritage wheats, both White Sonoran and Pima Club, are making a strong comeback due to their sweet flavor, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. Their low gluten content makes them a good choice for people with gluten sensitivity. Specialty bakers advertise breads made with local heritage wheats, and local brewers use them as an ingredient in beer. It’s a welcome rediscovery of a food with a complex and once almost forgotten history.
Carolyn Niethammer’s A Desert Feast (University of Arizona Press, 2020) is available online and at local booksellers.
The print edition of Zócalo Magazine has momentarily paused, but we’ll be back when more of our marvelous advertisers and distribution outlets are fully serving the community. In the meantime, please continue to support your local Tucson businesses!
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