A legend in his own time, self-styled "aural" historian, community musicologist, river runner, and environmental activist Jack Loeffler dedicated his long career to "the art of listening" and recording, harvesting and winnowing the voices of the land in the North American Southwest and Mexico. He regards "sound as the most deeply penetrating of the five senses, at the same time the most intuitively and intellectually evocative” (156). For him, his interlocutors, and his listeners, recorded sound is a mnemonic touchstone and pathway into deep memory and critical reflection. Hearing stories and songs propelled by breath itself gives them special resonance often absent in writing. This memoir evokes orality and places storytelling on center stage.
The Fray Angélico Chávez Library of the New Mexico History Museum is the main repository of Loeffler's recordings of Native music and many hundreds of hours of interviews. His technically superb recordings of Nuevomexicano folk music are archived in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center and the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico's Zimmerman Library. He was always drawn to music, and his recordings of Nuevomexicano performers resulted in a landmark book and CDs of lyric and narrative genres, regional dance traditions, and ceremonial music. He contextualizes his work culturally and socially, but distinguishes it by using the overarching frameworks of bioregion and habitat, to trace the relationships between cultural and natural diversity.
Ordinary musicians stand tall among the writers, prophets, activists, cultural warriors, and ethno-philosophers who have defended the Southwest from the "juggernaut" of American capitalist expansionism, with its cancerous economy and its sacrifice of desert ecosystems to unsustainable urbanization. As antidote, Loeffler explores multicultural notions of homeland based in habitat, what is called querencia or love of place, in folk Spanish. For in desert lands, the "tragedy of the commons" can be especially devastating. The remedy is love of the land through the restorative metaphor of "reseeding the commons of human consciousness" in preparation for the planetary challenges to come.
Loeffler's memoir recounts his self-directed learning-as-listening; how he gravitated to the greatest like-minds of his times, recorded their voices, and offered them up to the nation through radio, museum exhibits, ten books and myriad articles. He abandoned the institutions of academic disciplines, and chose the Museum of New Mexico as his home base. The two years he drove a traveling exhibit in a walk-through semi-trailer to dozens of communities outside the population centers of Albuquerque and Santa Fe was his last and only full-time job. Since then he has been an adventurous free-lancer. A master artist of the sound collage, Loeffler has foregrounded and broadcast these voices in numerous museum audio installations and over 400 radio programs. His favorite international projects in Mexico include fieldwork with the Wixáritari (Huicholes) in the state of Nayarit, the Seris of Sonora, and an ambitious audio guide to the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, from Zacatecas north to Santa Fe.
One among many notable projects is "Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West” (2001) radio series and archive, based on seventy-five in-depth interviews with all the players and stakeholders of the enormous watershed of the Colorado River he could muster, from indigenous voices to visionary regional planners, to the "water buffalos," the technicians who administer the plumbing of the largest river in the Southwest. Loeffler claims John Wesley Powell as the forefather of bioregionalism, with his development plan for western states, organized and administered by watersheds rather than geometrical lines on a map. Loeffler also claims Aldo Leopold for inspiring him to not only "think like a mountain," but to "think like a watershed" as well. The eco-anarchism of Edward Abbey provided him with a plan for action on multiple fronts. Loeffler is the first and foremost of Abbey's biographers.
As a young man coming of age in the shadow of the Depression and World War II, Loeffler was bored with the college and musical conservatory he attended, dropped out, and joined the Army. Instead of serving on the battlefields of Korea, he played trumpet in the Army Band, which played for ceremonial occasions like the open-air detonations of an atomic bomb on a Nevada test site. That otherworldly flash was an epiphany that redirected his life. Jack followed his jazz trumpet to the bars and coffee houses of San Francisco's North Beach, where he witnessed the triple emergence of the Beat poets, the counter culture, and the post-war environmental movement. The figure standing at this crossroads was Gary Snyder, who became a lifelong fellow traveler. Jack also met the future founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, who urged him to spend some time on the Navajo Reservation. There he was witness to the monstrous extraction of coal from sacred Black Mesa. Most of it is still railroaded to the Navajo Generating Station that powers the Central Arizona Project and casts its smoke over the Grand Canyon. More coal was pulverized, mixed with water from Hopi sacred springs, and slurried to the Mohave Generating Station on banks of the Colorado. From there, Loeffler's road led to three summers as a fire lookout near the San Juan River and eventually to the "Land of Clear Light"—New Mexico, Santa Fe, and the Río Grande watershed where he dug in for his life's work and ecological advocacy, beginning with the Black Mesa Defense Fund.
Now in his eighties, Jack Loeffler has finally taken the time to foreground his own journey in a memoir only half-filled with his own reflections. The other half is built around narratives from the deepest thinkers and activists he knows, has interviewed, and counts as friends. On the Native side, the list includes Navajo hatali spiritual leaders, Seri shaman singers, Tohono O'Odham seed savers, Hopi prophet elders, and Tewa cultural activists. The Euro-American side includes Pulitzer prizewinners (Gary Snyder), MacArthur fellows (Gary Nabhan), a Secretary of the Interior (Stewart Udall), acequia leaders (Estevan Arellano), scientists, sociologists, anarchists, and poets. The voices in Jack's archive literally rise from the grass roots with the avian and mammalian denizens of deserts and sierras, to the deep thoughts of their human advocates and defenders. This memoir is at once a desideratum, a manifesto, a listener's guide to the Southwest, and a call to arms.
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[Review length: 1042 words • Review posted on December 5, 2019]