Native American flute music continues a renaissance started around 1960. R Carlos Nakai has played a pivotal role in the broadening awareness and popularity as one of the premier Native American flute players of the last 30 years beginning with his debut album in 1983. In the movie SongKeeper 2010, he says of himself, “I call myself a sound painter doing soundscapes in the air above peoples’ heads.”
Dirty Linen, a magazine of folk and world music, said of him in 1993, “Single-handedly, it seems R Carlos Nakai has raised the music world’s consciousness in terms of traditional indigenous music of Native North Americans with his recordings of the Native American cedar flute.”
Heritage of R Carlos Nakai
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#B55938″ class=”” size=””]I call myself a sound painter doing soundscapes in the air above peoples’ heads.[/pullquote]
Nakai descends from the Navajo and Ute peoples. Currently the Navajo Nation is the largest of the federally recognized tribes in the United States. The Navajo’s language connects to languages spoken by native peoples in northwest Canada and Alaska. Today the states of Arizona and New Mexico have the largest Navajo populations.
The Ute People inhabited the Great Plains. Today their small numbers primarily live in Colorado and Utah (a state which derived its name from the Utes).
Given his native heritage, you would assume that his flute playing was a natural outgrowth of that. However, it was his research and study of the Native American flute, more than his heritage, that contributed to Nakai’s becoming such a preeminent artist with the Native American flute.
Early years
Interestingly R Carlos Nakai did not grow up in a musical family. He grew up in a farming family in Poston, Arizona north and west of Phoenix. Not only that, the flute was not that much a part of the cultural communities that he was a part of. His instrumental playing was nurtured through studying brass and playing in the marching band at Northern Arizona University. An auto accident left him with an injury that would not allow playing brass instruments anymore. Not long afterwards, he was given a Native American flute. The rest, as “they” say, is history…
The first Native American flute festival
One of the more interesting stories that I found is told by Ken Light about what happened at the first Native American Flute festival in Grand Junction, Colorado. Only two flute players showed up: R. Carlos Nakai and Ken Light, this red-headed tall “white guy.” The organizer was fairly aghast at the thought of half the flute-playing contingent at the first Native American Flute festival wasn’t “native.” As Ken was practicing for his performance, he heard another flute. Finding the source of the flute, Ken met Nakai for the first time. Hitting it off as former teachers on Indian reservations and fellow flute makers and players, they teamed up to start an annual retreat that continues to this day. Another teacher who attended one of the early flute retreats started Oregon Flute Circle, the first Native American flute circle, according to Ken.
Collaborations…
Carlos Nakai has demonstrated his versatility as well as that of the Native American flute by collaborating cross-culturally and internationally with an amazing variety of musicians. A sampling of these include…
- Udi Bar-David and Jewish music
- Japanese folk ensemble
- Tibetan flutist and singer Nawang Khechog
- Hawaii’s slack key guitar virtuoso, Keola Beamer
- Composers James DeMars and Phillip Glass
- Various symphony orchestras
It is no wonder that when you think of the Native American flute, the name of R Carlos Nakai is close at hand. The renaissance and continued growth in popularity is in no small part due to his role.