Sunday, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller declared October 26 Nicolás Lell Benavides Day. It was at the New Mexico premier of the composer’s new opera Dolores, about his cousin, Dolores Huerta.
Now Benavides has released an album titled Canto Caló. It’s a two part work in Spanish and accompanied by a four string quartet that he calls a love letter to New Mexico and his heritage. He spoke with KUNM’s Mia Casas.
NICOLÁS LELL BENAVIDES: It was one of those projects that sort of grew and grew out of something smaller. I wasn’t originally working on this album. I got commissioned to write a song inspired by my grandfather, who had recently passed away, maybe in 2018. He was really amazing. He was like one of a dozen kids, and he hitchhiked from Albuquerque to Oakland when he was 14, and he worked as the mambo dance teacher in the ballrooms because he didn’t have, like, a formal education. Then his life got upended when he got drafted into the Korean War. On the boat ride, he wrote a poem, which became Canción de guerra, that he recited to himself over and over again to placate himself, because he was getting nerves, he was getting a little scared on the boat ride over to be in the army. In hospice he was like, dancing until his like, last month of life, right? He was just like, so pumped for us all to be visiting him in his room. He was like throwing parties. The nurses were like, what’s going on in there? Like, and then he had recited this to me before, but he’s like, ‘Come here, I want to tell you something.’ And he recited this poem for me. And he’s like, ‘you know, I wrote this to myself, and I think it’s really cool.’ I was like, actually, it is really cool. And I went home, and after he passed, I kept mulling it over. So I wrote this song, the third song in the set Canción de guerra is one of those things that people just enjoyed the first little few minutes of it, and then it just kept growing…