For the love of music
AUDREY DAVIS: VIOLINIST AND INSTRUCTOR EXTRAORDINAIRE
Audrey Davis: violinist and instructor extraordinaire
That’s Audrey Davis talking about playing and teaching violin. So highly regarded by families and violin students of Taos and Northern New Mexico, two of her students, Cidney Fee and Cathy Boyle, submitted Davis’ name for an Artes story this year, feeling that the entire community should celebrate Davis’ contributions.
Fee and Boyle wrote that Davis started teaching violin in Taos through the Suzuki method to kids, teens and adults 35 years ago, noting, too, “She often reduces or waives costs of lessons to those in need,” as well as loaning students violins as needed.
“I’m now teaching the kids of the kids I taught,” Davis said happily.
She first started teaching violin students after Nick Branchál, mariachi maestro de Taos, approached her to teach violin to his nascent mariachi students in Taos schools. In 1981, at Taos High School, Branchál started the first academically credited high school mariachi program in New Mexico. Since then, mariachi programs throughout the nation have used his model to start similar programs in their schools. Branchál, and consequently Davis, have taught high school mariachi in Taos and Questa, and to university groups at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas and Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado.
“In 1993 Audrey brought a string quartet to the school and I asked if she would do mariachi,” Branchál said in a recent phone interview. “She had volunteered for almost a year when I approached the school to pay her for it and we have been doing it ever since. We started Mariachi Río Grandé soon after that and we played at Garduños in Santa Fe for three years or so.”
“Audrey and I go way back,” he concluded. “I love Audrey. We’re like family. She has a big heart. She loves her students. She loves what she does. And we love her.”
Rachel León, director of Questa school’s Mariachi Questa, is Davis’ former Mariachi León partner. “I think it’s so awesome that Audrey is being written about,” León said by phone. “Audrey and I worked for many years with various directors in the area. We’ve been together off and on for 10 years, playing together. We played together a few weeks ago at a birthday party up near Taos Ski Valley. Audrey’s violin is just such a rich sound. And she has all that experience from Jenny Vincent; all those years with her Suzuki School. All the kids know who she is and they always ask, ‘When can we have a workshop again with Audrey?’ She’s able to emphasize good, correct violin technique,” because of her Suzuki training.
Dating from the mid-20th century, the Suzuki method is an internationally known music curriculum and teaching philosophy created by Japanese violinist and pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki. The method aims to create an environment for learning music that parallels the linguistic environment of acquiring a native language.
‘I’m never gonna make a ton of money — I’m just doing what makes me happy.’
THE VIOLINIST
Davis bopped around Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado from the mid-’70s until 1978, when she bought Taos Designs jewelry store on Taos Plaza. Before coming out West, she played with the Concord Symphony of Massachusetts, the Boston Ballet and the Nashua Symphony of New Hampshire. Subsequently, while her son was a student at Boulder University in Colorado, she played with the Boulder Symphony and the Santa Fe Community Orchestra recalling how she, Total Arts Taos gallery co-owner Harold Geller and former Taos Judge Peggy Nelson would drive to Santa Fe every week for rehearsals.
“I fell in love with it, then when I moved here and met Jenny Vincent,” she said about Northern New Mexico folk music that Vincent literally recorded for the first time, saving it for posterity. It has now become a thriving genre in its own right.
Traditionally, Norteños of New Mexico and Southern Colorado would get together and play these songs at weddings and other social occasions, songs including dance tunes like polkas, varsovianas (a French derivation referring to “Warsaw” dances), waltzes and more. Davis joined guitarist Rick Klein and Vincent in the Jenny Vincent Trio in 1996 and played violin with the trio until Vincent’s death in 2016.
Davis also taught violin for third- through eighth-graders at the Country Day School of Taos for 12 years before it closed its doors. “The whole class had violins,” Davis recalled. “We had an all-string orchestra. We made a CD called ‘Class of Strings’ – it was a wonderful gig. They do really good in school after violin lessons. These kids go on to get music degrees, and some play mariachi. I’m really proud of all these hundreds and hundreds of kids I’ve worked with. And they love it.”
From 2015-17, The Healy Foundation of Taos — through the former Peoples Bank (now Hillcrest Bank) — gave two years of grants to Branchál, Davis and Norbert Martinez to teach New Mexican folk music to Taos school students, as well as to pay well-known Taos folk dance teacher Dorothy Gusdorf to teach the dances that went along with the music. Gusdorf taught middle and high school kids the dances their grandparents knew when they were growing up. She also taught adults once a week.
“Once the grants were finished, the adults started dance groups in their own villages so they could keep the traditions alive,” Davis recalled, smiling at the impact that reviving the folk music has had on the communities overall.
Besides teaching violin, Davis and John Archuleta are the well-known Audrey Davis Duo who play Northern New Mexican folk music weekly at the Adobe Bar in The Historic Taos Inn, among other venues. Their 2015 CD, “Cuatro Milpas/Four Cornfields,” is a collection of music “passed down from Jenny Vincent, Tío Damián, Julia Jaramillo and many others,” according to the CD jacket.
“Audrey is a very accomplished violin player,” Archuleta said in an email, “and it is an honor and privilege to have been her performance partner for the last 10 years. She has adapted well to the regional music (Northern New Mexico-Southern Colorado) that we specialize in, and also the mariachi music that she is involved in. She is quite a good artist [painter] also, and shows her work in local galleries. So it’s a real pleasure to be playing with her.”
THE ARTIST
Davis paints in pastels and is currently represented at The Ranch on Kit Carson Road in Taos. Gallery director Lanna Smith is excited about Davis’ prospects.
“Audrey’s vitality is infectious,” Smith said in an email. “She is a sheer joy to have in the gallery. Her pastels are some of the most etherial and beautiful I have seen, which is the reason her collectors regularly call on us to see what is new. We love Audrey.”
“I’ve been blessed in Taos,” Davis said.
The underlying purpose of reviving mariachi is fostering greater understanding of Hispanic culture and the origin and impact of this engaging music. And Davis appreciates every note, every student.
“I just can’t believe I fell into my life’s work in 1984,” Davis said, her face wreathing with amazement and joy each time she thinks about it. “Truly it was a blessing. A miracle.”
For more information about Davis’ music, call Taos Suzuki Violin School, (575) 758-4291. To see her artwork, contact Lanna Smith, The Ranch at Taos, 119-A Kit Carson Road, or call (325) 647-5736.