Artist Bio:
Native American flautist Robert Mirabal's career has two distinct parts. In the early years he played traditional flute in a style similar to that of R. Carlos Nakai while eschewing the New Age sound that many other Native American musicians adopted. He then formed Mirabal in 1996, and this aggressive "alter-Native" band combines elements of rock, funk, techno, hip-hop, blues and the singer-songwriter end of folk music.
Mirabal grew up a family that was broken apart by U.S. government relocation policies in the '70s. Mirabal lived with his mother, grandparents and extended family in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, and he attended school in the pueblo. There he learned how to play clarinet, saxophone, piano, drums and just about anything else he could get his hands on. At age 18 it was the flute, which sent him on the journey that continues to this day.
Mirabal's career took off amid the flute renaissance that was taking place in Native American music in the late '80s. His made his album debut in 1988 with a self-titled effort. He toured as well, playing all over North America and Europe as well as Russia and Japan. According to Mirabal, the experiences of traveling opened him up to new ideas about the music he wanted to create. He lived in New York City for a while, playing in a multicultural band made up of a Senegalese guitarist, a Cape Verdean drummer and Haitian keyboardist.
While living in the city, Mirabal immersed himself in the sound of hip-hop, funk and R&B, which ruled the streets and airwaves and would subsequently inform his music as well. He also received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie award for the score to Land, an album and suite he wrote and recorded for Japanese modern dancers Eiko and Koma. All these disparate interests and experiences led to the rock band Mirabal in 1995. Bassist Mark Andes, from the '60s band Spirit, helped Mirabel form the band, along with drummer Reynaldo Lujan and his wide-ranging knowledge of global beats. The players moved the music well beyond the stark and spiritual sound of the leader's earlier work; Mirabel's flute could now also convey anger, happiness, loneliness and pain. Moreover, Mirabal gave the songs vivid narratives via lyrics taken from poems and stories he'd written in his journal. This new band, rounded out by a cast of others, created what many consider to be the flutist's finest effort to date, 1997's Mirabel.
More recently Robert Mirabal collaborated with Native American singer-songwriter Bill Miller on the latter's Native Suite-Chants, Dances and the Remembered Earth. A Skeleton of a Bridge is a printed collection of Mirabal's short stories, prose and poetry. A longtime flute maker, Mirabal's instruments have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of the American Indian. Mirabal combined the literary and the musical on 2003's Indians Indians, combining spoken-word monologues with sparse programming, acoustic guitar, cello, bass and percussion to create a story for and about modern Native American communities. —Tad Hendrickson
