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Jazz Articles » Interview » Chris Cheek: Songs Of Inspiration And Atonement
Courtesy Jan Panis
I think of Keepers Of The Eastern Door as an ode to those whose lives
embody an intellect and
intuition
profoundly tuned to the natural world.
Chris Cheek
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Chris Cheek‘s Keepers of the Eastern Door (Analog Tone Factory, 2025) was inspired by the suffering and resilience of Native Americans.
Cheek grew up in the area of Cahokia Mounds World Heritage & State Park, the largest pre-Columbian site north of Mexico. In his book 1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005), Charles C. Mann wrote:
Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 AD would have seen it looming in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza . . . [l]ocated near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers, the Indian city of Cahokia was a busy port . . . [c]overing five square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of the Rio Grande until the eighteenth century.
Visits to the park, along with travels to Mohawk territory and the Edward Sheriff Curtis Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum, were some of the experiences that went into Cheek’s Keepers Of The Eastern Door, which AAJ writer David Weiner called “a beautifully played, richly melodic and creatively curated set of performances, which split the difference between enchantment and fun.”
Please see the Interviewer’s Note following the interview for more information about recent archeological and historical developments about the pre-Columbian civilizations in The Americas.
Chris Cheek and I met by video on June 3, 2025. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
All About Jazz: Chris, thank you for meeting with me to discuss your new album, Keepers Of The Eastern Door.
Chris Cheek: You’re quite welcome.
AAJ: My first question is about the Native American themes. What does that mean in the context of the album?
CC: I’ve always been interested in Native American history. I grew up in St. Louis and frequently visited the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Among the curiosities there are Monk’s Mound and an area known as “Woodhenge.”
That site was discovered during the construction of Highway 55 in the early 1960s which, it turns out, is a solar calendar marking the yearly cycle of the sun’s passage across the sky, crucial for agriculture and predicting the seasons and the migration of animals. Most of the rest of the site is still unexcavated.
In a way, it’s their version of Stonehenge. It’s a circular construction, built with straight posts fashioned from a special type of very straight pine. I’ve always been fascinated by that, knowing that area around the Mississippi and around St. Louis was inhabited by indigenous peoples. Those visits created a curiosity and reverence for indigenous people.
Presently, I’m feeling overwhelmed with the pace of technology, industry, and mechanization our society has created. And the intense waste, pollution, energy consumption, materialism, unkindness among humans, and disrespect for the earth is saddening and just kind of mind-boggling to me.
The album was inspired by the traditional values of interconnectedness and interdependence, a reverence for nature and a desire to live in accord with the society and the world. Also, the important perspective of assuming a protectoral position toward the planet and not regarding the earth as an object that’s merely ours for the taking. The books Black Elk Speaks and The Hopi Survival Kit have also been influential for me.
As to Keepers Of The Eastern Door,I’d been working with some of those tunes for a while but hadn’t necessarily thought about recording or doing a next project. Then when Jerome (
Jerome Sabbagh
saxophone, tenor
b.1973
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Jerome Sabbagh, musician and Founder of Analog Tone Factory) approached me about making a record with
Bill Frisell
guitar, electric
b.1951
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Bill Frisell. I started wondering how some of these musical materials I had been gathering might have kind of a common thread or theme.
So a couple Februaries ago my partner and I took a late Valentine’s Day getaway to Plattsburgh, New York and Lake Champlain. That is a beautiful, magical place, and we loved being outside and standing in awe of nature.
After we took the ferry across the lake from Grand Isle, Vermont and while driving north along the western shores, I started seeing all these historical markers designating important battles with the Mohawk Indians with dates and names of different generals who were killed. There were so many of them and I didn’t know anything about any of it.
When I got home I started doing some research about it and found out about the Iroquois Confederacy and how the Mohawk tribe was one of the founding members of that nation-alliance. I wasn’t thinking so much about the military escalations but about all the innocent families would have gotten caught up in those kinds of devastating conflicts. I imagine most people just wanted to live in peace with the land, care for their elders, raise their children, and have enough shelter and food to eat but suddenly they face unexpected and insurmountable obstacles that they had nothing to do with.
Throughout humanity’s history, people just get steamrolled by civilization’s progress and warring; cultures continue to rise and overtake other cultures. So, my inspiration was also to consider the Mohawks as a metaphor for the plight of an indigenous and traditions-based society.
When this record was coming around, I saw an article about the bison skull mountain and thought, my god, that really happened, they exterminated the buffalo to sever the Indians’ tether to the earth? That’s unfathomable to me. I started reflecting on my privilege and the privilege of people like me and asked, “how can we possibly atone for what our ancestors did?”
INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Cheek is referring to a famous 1892 photograph taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Michigan of a mountain of bison skulls taken from slaughtered bison. In a December 2, 2020 article in The Conversation, Danielle Taschereau Mamers cites Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2000): “at the close of the 18th century, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the continent. By the time of this photograph, that population was reduced to only 456 wild bison.”
AAJ:Tell me about the first song on the album, “Kino’s Canoe.” I assume that was reference to John Steinbeck’s short story, The Pearl (Viking Press, 1947)?
CC: Yes. I read and loved that vivid and poignant story awhile back and the name “Kino’s Canoe” just kind of stayed with me. Sometimes as an exercise, when I find a piece of good literature, I like to try to put rhythm and melody to the text. I knew I’d like to try that with some of those passages, but set it aside for the time being.
I have been playing in (Argentine composer)
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Guillermo Klein‘s band (Los Gauchos) for over 20 years and a few years ago I took a composition class with him where, among other strategies, he described a “mirroring technique” where you find the “symmetry” of a piece of music. It begins by finding a point of inversion or a “horizon.”
The horizon could be any note, but generally I like to use the tonic. For example, if the tune is in the key of C, you flip the intervals so that if the melody goes up, i.e., C-D-E, then the mirror version of the melody would go down: C-B flat-A flat. You do the same thing with the harmony and a C Major triad inverted would become an F minor triad. You wind up with this new song that’s strangely reminiscent of the original tune. It doesn’t automatically give you a great piece of music, but it’s an interesting process.
Once you work through the technique, you’re free to experiment with the chords, rhythm, and melody and mess around with it and try different variations depending on what sounds good to your ear, that’s where everyone would come up with something different, I think, in the end. By its nature, instrumental music is abstract. It’s hard to say what it is what it isn’t. One thing that helps me as a saxophonist is to work with pre-existing forms and structures.
As in The Pearl, when you have text you have some kind of comprehensible idea or message. When you find a melody and a rhythm for those words, now you have a musical idea with a certain degree of clarity.
Well-written text and well-spoken speech has a flow and pacing to it. And so, when you try to balance words with pitches and rhythm, something starts to unfold. It doesn’t always go smoothly and the result might not be what you expected, but if you spend time with it usually something very interesting happens.
When you combine a mechanical system or technique with human intuition, you arrive at a place that you might not normally find just by writing off the top of your head. That was the starting point for “Kino’s Canoe.” I used the mirror/symmetry technique on a popular jazz tune and, using some phrases from The Pearl, tried to re-work text into the rhythm of the original melody. The passage from The Pearl was:
The wind blew fierce and strong, and it pelted them with bits of sticks, sand, and little rocks. Juana and Kino gathered their clothing tighter about them and the two walked carefully. Now they could see the road ahead of them. All night they walked and never changed their pace. The coyotes cried and laughed in the brush, owls screeched and hissed over their heads, some large animal lumbered away, crackling as it went.
I started working on “Kino’s Canoe” and Keepers Of The Easter Door after I came back from Plattsburgh because I was getting ready to go The Netherlands for a short tour and the guys in the band invited me bring some new material to try out.
When Jerome asked me if I had any ideas about artwork for the cover of the record, I sent him a picture I had taken of Edward Curtis’ “Canyon de Chelly” which I had seen hanging in the Saint Louis Art Museum during a visit there with my mom a couple of summers ago. He immediately did some excavating and discovered more of Curtis’ photographs from the turn of the century.
I was still working on “Kino’s Canoe” off and and so when I saw Curtis’ “Kutenai Duck Hunter” (album cover image), it helped me understand what that tune and that record were going to be about.
Once we had the artwork, I started to think about how these other tunes I had been collecting might somehow be related. “O Sacrum Convivium!” (Olivier Messiaen) is about the sacredness of life and “On A Clear Day” (Burton Lane & Alan Jay Lerner), in my mind, seemed like an appropriate soundtrack to the image of those figures strolling across the floor of the canyon (Canyon de Chelly).
With “Lost Is My Quiet,” (Henry Purcell) I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that one or if it was even going to work. It was still new to me but I wanted to try it because it has these two beautiful interweaving melodic lines and suggests a very interesting harmonic rhythm and progression.
And something about the sentiment of that song to me, symbolically, resonated with the plight of the indigenous Native American people. They’re in this paradise and they see it being taken away from them. But, in the midst of hatred and aggression, their spirit remains unbroken; that doesn’t stop them. They resolve to stay true to their traditions and keep going no matter the outcome.
AAJ: Did you come up with the track listing?
CC: Jerome came up with the order. I’m really grateful to him for that. I’m usually very particular about set lists and orders of tunes on the record, but I think he found a really good sequence for the music.
AAJ: Tell me about the Beatles tune (“From Me To You”).
CC: My brother Jon lives in St. Louis. He’s an electric bassist and he spins vinyl. When I’m there, we like to listen to music together. He has my old turntable and speakers. One evening he put that tune on; I’d never heard it before, and I was like, “wow, that’s really nice! yeah . . . so I transcribed it.
For my part, “From Me To You” feels like a peace offering to the ancestors and our planet. The message of the song begins, “[i]f there’s anything that you want, if there’s anything I can do, just call on me and I’ll send it along, with love from me to you.”
I think of Keepers Of The Eastern Door as an ode to those whose lives embody an intellect and intuition profoundly tuned to the natural world. And for peoples that, in the midst of seemingly insurmountable odds, strive to preserve a way of life lived in harmony and balance with their surroundings, and who acknowledge and seek to commune with a hidden, immutable dimension that underlies and interweaves throughout the sensorial realm.
Additionally and in no small way, it’s also a dedication to my musician friends and colleagues in New York and everyone across the globe who does what they can to keep the tradition of jazz going, alive and well!
INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Scholarship in the past few decades has disproved just about everything we thought we knew about Native Americans. Native Americans did not arrive in the Americas by crossing the Bering Strait land bridge 12,000 years ago (they likely travelled by sea). Further, assumptions that they lived as nomadic bands with little effect on the land are simply wrong.
In 1491 there were more people living in the Americas than Europe, and Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) was more populous and sophisticated than any European city. The “virgin lands” encountered by American settlers had actually been transformed with fire by Native Americans who introduced bison to the plains and had developed corn in a complex process of genetic engineering.
I recommend Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Sophie D. Coe’s America’s First Cuisines, (University of Texas Press, 1994), and the National Parks Service website “Mississippian Culture.”
Finally, I wish to thank John McCray, an anthropologist specializing in the prehistoric Southwest for his expert guidance. He is also the host of the podcast “An Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans.”
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