Biamp Portland Jazz Festival: Cochemea w/ Dreckig

Music is in multi-instrumentalist and composer  Cochemea Gastelum’s blood — he comes from a  long line of musicians on both sides of his lineage.  For over 25 years, Cochemea has built a distinct career as a soloist, section player, and composer/arranger, collaborating with artists across genres — from his long tenure with Sharon Jones and the Dap- Kings to work with Kevin Morby, Run The  Jewels, Jon Batiste, Amy Winehouse, The Roots, Archie Shepp, Mark Ronson, and Quincy Jones, among many others. 

His forthcoming album on Daptone Records, Vol. 3:  Ancestros Futuros, is the third volume in a series  that includes All My Relations (2019) and Vol. 2:  Baca Sewa (2021). Across his body of work,  Cochemea interweaves the past, present, and future, engaging with time as speculative history— one that moves fluidly between memory and  possibility. 

Vol. 3: Ancestros Futuros is anchored in the cultural  fabric that has nurtured Cochemea from the  beginning. A California native of Yaqui ancestry,  Cochemea describes a central part of his work as  “accessing ancestral memory that comes in different forms—sometimes when you visit a place, sometimes in dreams… it’s in our DNA. For me, it’s about seeking wholeness in these zones of fracture.” 

Dreams play a vital role in his creative process. “A lot of melodies come to me through dreams,” he  shares. “I’ve kept a record of them for years, shaping  the language into dream scores as foundations for compositions that connect the conscious and  unconscious realm.” One such score appears on the back cover of Ancestros Futuros, reflecting the  intuitive and layered nature of his work. This dream guided approach informs the album’s opening track, Transmisión del Soñar, which serves as a portal  between dimensions. 

The album is also shaped by stories of survival and  resistance. The title track, Ancestros Futuros, draws  from a story of a Yaqui midwife who would bury the  navels of newborns in the ground so that future  generations would rise and reclaim the land. “I was  thinking about survival as a continuum connecting  past and future generations,” Cochemea explains, a  theme that echoes throughout his compositions. 

Cochemea’s musical and spiritual synthesis is made  possible through his reverence for the horn and the  music and traditions that precede him. His distinct  voice as a saxophonist and flutist places him within  a lineage of players who honor the past while blending dexterity with invention. Inspired by heroes  like Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef, Jim Pepper, and  Gato Barbieri, he coaxes his instruments into  intimate and expressive realms, bridging ancestral  rhythmic traditions with forward- looking vision,  creating a signature sound that is both deeply rooted  and expansive. 

Vol. 3: Ancestros Futuros finds Cochemea building  worlds of sound, blending past, present, and future  into a ritual offering —an evolving sonic fiction  carried across space-time, where memory, survival,  and imagination converge.