The Wood That Sings

CHESLEY GOSEYUN WILSON PLAYS the Wood That Sings

PLANT THAT SOME MISTAKENLY BELIEVE WILL LAST A HUNDRED YEARS. IT'S CALLED THE CENTURY PLANT OR AGAVE.

Usually this plant doesn't sing at all unless the fiery winds go crazy on a late afternoon in summer. Then everything in the desert sings, a great rushing chorus of small plants and fat cactuses battered by wind and airborne sand, punctuated now and then by

TEXT BY SAM NEGRI PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESS ALFORD

the dominant crack of monsoon thunder. Chesley Goseyun Wilson is the man who brings music to the wood that sings. Wilson, an Apache who was born on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, makes a one-string violin from the stalk of the agave, an instrument his people call tsli'edo'a'tl, "wood that sings." Others simply call it an Apache violin.

Apaches made these odd-looking violins for at least a century some think it's been much longer than that but until Wilson took up the craft, it had nearly disappeared.

In the past, most Apache homes had one of these simple violins. They were used to entertain at birthday parties and other social gatherings. More recently they've functioned mainly as a tourist item. However, tourist violins are made to be seen and not heard. Unlike the fine instrument that Wilson crafts, most of them can't be played.

Wilson gathers the wood he needs to make his violins from the arid hills of the San Carlos reservation in central Arizona. The agave puts out its 12to 18-foot-tall rigid stalk, which then flowers and dies. Wilson looks for stalks that are just right, dead but not desiccated. The stalk will form the body of the violin, but it can't be too green or it will ooze a sap that causes itching; and it can't be too dry or it will crack when he drills sound holes into it.

He cuts the stalk into 16-inch lengths, then uses a pocket knife to pry out the soft interior until it is smooth and hollow. Then he drills the sound holes. "They used to burn the holes into the wood, but hey, this is the '90s, so I use a drill," Wilson says.

Wilson then varnishes the violin body inside and out. He ties the lone string, which is sometimes horsehair and sometimes violin string, in place, one end to the tuning peg that will pierce the side of the body, the other end to a tiny dowel in the top of the instrument.

Finally he seals both ends of the stalk with plywood, and then he decorates the instrument with snakes, geometric shapes, or symbolic Apache motifs.

He makes the instrument's bow from a pliant wood, such as willow or aspen, and adds strings of horsehair. The sound produced by the bow on the violin is soft and intimate, just about the right volume for listening while sitting next to a wood stove in a small room.

"The songs I play are the songs my grandfather sang," Wilson says. "The way I make the violins is the way my grandfather and uncle showed me."

In 1988 the Navajo-Ute flute player Carlos Nakai saw Wilson demonstrating his violins at a crafts shop. Nakai brought Wilson to the attention of the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1989 he became one of 13 Americans awarded a Heritage Fellowship. Publicity connected to the award yanked Wilson from anonymity. Suddenly he was featured on the Public Broadcasting Network, and then invitations arrived for him to do demonstrations in Chicago and other parts of the country.

Eventually Hollywood and advertising executives came calling. Wilson, with his slender build, small bones, flat face, and jet-black hair (despite his 60-plus years), looks like what he is, an Apache descended from two famous chiefs: Cochise and Eskiminzin. For a national ad, Wrangler jeans put Wilson in a pair of its pants and photographed him on a hillside in the desert holding one of his violins. The prominent artist Howard Terpening uses Wilson as a model for Indian portraits, and Hollywood producers call him for bit parts in movies about Apaches.

Most of this attention was a part of the remarkable spin-off of being a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship winner. More recently the Kronos Quartet commissioned Phoenix composer Brent Davids to write a 15-minute chamber music piece for the Apache violin. It premiered in Cologne, Germany.

"I'm glad," says Wilson, "to finally get recognition, not just for myself as an artist, but for the Apache people. I think most people see Apaches in a Hollywood movie kind of way, very violent. I am glad that they will get to see and hear a different, more usual side of the Apache people."