Music Award nominee interviews: Wes Watkins, iZCALLi, Youth on Record

The 3rd annual Colorado Sound Music Awards are coming up this week (Wed., Sept. 18 at the Boulder Theater). And leading up to the award show I spoke with a bunch of different nominees, who were guests on The Colorado Sound Morning Show during the past few months. Our conversations were a lot of fun, so I wanted to share some “best of” moments.

Below are highlights from my interviews with three of this year’s nominees: Wes Watkins, Miguel Avina of iZCALLi, and Haley Witt of Youth on Record.

Wes Watkins

I asked Wes Watkins about how Civil Rights activists like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and James Baldwin have influenced his music.

“It’s funny you mentioned those people…I got goosebumps.

“[One] thing that happened during the quarantine is I had time to write. I’ve written over 2,000 songs now. People know me as a trumpet player, they know me as a singer, but really the thing is I’m a writer. And so especially when quarantine hit, first I was like we gotta talk about racism in a way people can hear it. So I wrote some songs like where I didn’t talk about racism, but I did, like ‘for the birds’ or ‘for my dogs,’ or ‘for the trees,’ because we all love trees and dogs and birds right?

“Then I had this whole thing where I was, ‘man we need like a School House Rock or like Sesame Street…. We need to be like unapologetic in our teachings of history, we need to stop sugarcoating it, because if we were just real about it the entire time we’d already be in a much different place. So, I started working on this series called Real Life Stories of History. I could tell white America ten billion times, ‘black people need a country, you guys don’t show up, where are my reparations?’ [Nasally voice]: ‘Well it’s been so long, that wasn’t my family.’ Suuuuurrrr-ish…Surish….

Instead, I decided I needed to look up first and foremost for myself the words of our leaders. What we don’t want to be doing is not doing the research and just repeating the same steps that we already took. So, how to make that research accessible? Make songs around them. And so I’m trying to make the new School House Rock – as soon as I find an animator who will work for cheap, because I’m a broke musician. I think that’s what we need, and it says things like [singing], ‘for ship or sail made of cotton, for a chain on brown skin bodies, to a land unknown it belongs to me, real life stories of history, because we built you your [stuff] for free.’

“I start with quotes from James Baldwin…or if I finish with quotes from Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton said, ‘I’m not gonna die in a car wreck, I’m going to die in the struggle.’ I just think all those words, if you just say those things. Now I’m sampling it, but for a while I was just orating it myself. Night and day different reaction, as soon as you hear James Baldwin’s voice, it changes.

“So those words, not only are they influential to me, I hope that it can really be an avenue to make research more accessible. To have some songs and some snippets, it’s a little easier to listen to and hopefully people laugh or cry about it or something to you know.”

Related: Meet the nominees of the 2024 Colorado Sound Music Awards

iZCALLi

I asked Miguel Avina if iZCALLi if there was a specific moment when he realized he wanted to be a musician.

“I definitely felt a little thrown into it. But there was a moment when I was on stage with my dad, and just seeing him take command of the fans, and take command of the crowd – making them dance and move around – that was a point for me where I was like, ‘Man this is something I want to do, this is something I want to get into.’”

Youth on Record

I asked Haley Witt what success meant for her when it comes to Youth on Record.

“The profound thing I’ve noticed coming out of our programs is a sense of community and a sense of belonging. That’s something we find through student surveys and student testimonials, but it’s also something that you find through lived experience in the space. It’s something you can feel at our open mics, it’s something you can feel in our programs that these young people come through.

“They make these lasting beautiful relationships, and that feels like a tremendous effort of success. It’s beautiful to watch people flourish in community with each other.”

Read more about these artists and organizations, and all this year’s nominees, on our 2024 Colorado Sound Music Awards nominee page.

The 3rd annual Colorado Sound Music Awards live ceremony and concert takes place Wed., Sept. 18 at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colo. TIckets are on sale now.