Cochemea Gastelum is a musician of indigenous descent. Through his Yaqui and Mescalero Apache Indian ancestry, he uses oral tradition and dreams to infer the music — an approach he applied to Vol. III: Ancestros Futuros, an album rooted in ancestral memory that looks at history from a non-linear perspective.
Performing as Cochemea with saxophone in hand, the California native has toured and recorded with Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and The Budos Band, in addition to working as a section player and composer. A central part of his work is discovering what family history looks like and the different ways it manifests.
This drive has taken many different forms, beginning with 2019’s All My Relations, which saw Cochemea and his close collaborators using loose inspiration and improvisation to create an album entrenched in shared identity. Two years later came Vol. II: Baca Sewa, a semi-biographical record diving into his family archives, mythology and cultural imagination.
The recent release of Vol. III: Futuros Ancestros closes a chapter. It’s an album that brings storytelling and dreams into play — the latter being a large part of his creative process. What resulted from it this time is a piece that defies categorization and uses many musical influences to capture something deeply personal.
I talked with Cochemea about the lessons he learned in creating the trilogy, oral traditions and dreamscapes.
Cochemea interview highlights
The following was lightly edited for length and clarity.
On the film version of Ancestros Futuros:
I did a lot of traveling with a Super 8 camera. I went to some ancestral places, where different parts of my family are from, in Mexico and New Mexico. And I sat with the footage and then I looked at my dream scores, and they served as these frameworks for music, but also for the film.
So it's really kind of like a visual poem composed of dream stuff, and it's layered, and there's a lot of landscapes, and there's a lot of blending of time and moments and memories — real memories. Imagine memories told through this lens of a sort of vague future ancestor, going through all these different places, so there's a lot of visual symbolism.
On the stories told in the project:
In Vol. II: Baca Sewa, my great-grandfather was a pearl diver, so I wrote a song called “Black Pearl.” I'll think about putting myself in this place, or try and imagine this place, and then there seems to be some kind of response. A melody will either come to me or there'll just be a feeling, and I just really try and tap into that feeling.
It'll come out in the form of some melody or chord or just some kind of drum. Other times, I'll have a rhythm that comes to me, and I'll attach that to a story. It happens in all these kinds of ways. In terms of specific stories, it was more like imagining what I had done, a lot of going back to family history and oral history, and oftentimes what I do is I intertwine them.
With Vol. III: Ancestros Futuros, I was really influenced more by ideas rather than a specific family story. I was really thinking about time and different concepts of time and parallel worlds — thinking about what we can bring into reality through our own imagination and collectivity and collective dreaming.
So it was really just more thinking about a speculative future and speculative history and kind of recontextualizing history. .. It's in one sense fictional but is in another sense activating this sort of imagination of what can we bring into reality through this kind of collective imagining of another kind of future.
