In May of 2018, Springdale was treated to a unique musical performance by a remarkable young pianist, Connor Chee.  Chee plays the classics like Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt in a magnificent style that earned him First Prize in the 2016 Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition, but we got more than that – much more!

Chee’s original compositions included something new:  Navajo “Vocables”.  His album The Navajo Piano explains that, “traditional Navajo chants [are] used as sources of inspiration.   These compositions draw from the rhythms, forms, and melodies of traditional Navajo music.”

Connor Chee didn’t invent vocables and his compositions are not even the most prominent Native American example.  That honor probably goes to The AIM Song, named for the inter-tribal song often heard at gatherings of members of the American Indian Movement.

But Chee has taken vocables way beyond the strictly traditional.  Blending virtuoso piano with Navajo that have been sun for generations, he has created something that is both new and traditional.  In The Navajo Piano, the Corn Grinding Song and the Squaw Dance Song are part of the compositions.

Chee explained to Z-Arts that he wasn’t even thinking of music when he first created music that included vocables.  “It was simply to transcribe some of the chants that my grandfather sang for preservation’s sake.”

In his album Emergence, Navajo chants by Keith Chee were sampled and incorporated into his original piano compositions.

Written by Dan Mabbutt