Musical career

In 1979, John Trudell met musical artist and activist Jackson Browne and became more interested in the musical world (and recording albums and performing his own compositions in live venues).
Trudell recorded an album A.K.A Grafitti Man ("graffiti" was misspelled in the title) with Kiowa guitarist Jesse Ed Davis that was originally available on cassette tape format only. This comports with the practice common to American indigenous and other so-called minorities of distributing music mixtapes captured live at group events and copied and distributed through non-commercial channels, like those of the San Francisco-based rock group Grateful Dead, Native American powwow music performances in general, and African American gatherings whence came the expression Each One Teach One, common also to an emerging grassroots movement that was arguably itself a response to the reactionary madness of slavery and/or military-industrial/imperialist hegemony flourishing in the 1980s.
In 1990 John Trudell took part in Tony Hymas's Oyaté project.
In 1992 Trudell remade and re-released A.K.A Grafitti Man as an audio CD to substantial critical and popular acclaim.
Arguably his greatest musical success came with the 1994 album "Johnny Damas & Me" that was described as "a culmination of years of poetic work, and an example of a process of fusing traditional sounds, values, and sensibilities with thought-provoking lyrics, this time with urgent rock and roll."^[18]
Other musical releases (many with his band Bad Dog) include aka grafitti Man (1986), Heart Jump Bouquet (1987), Blue Indians (1999), Descendant Now Ancestor (2001), Bone Days (2001), Live A Fip (2003), Madness and The Moremes (2007), Crazier Than Hell (2010), Wazi's Dream (2015).
Popular Music critic Neal Ullestad said of Trudell's live performances, "This isn't simply pop rock with Indian drums and chants added. It's integrated rock and roll by an American Indian with a multicultural band directed to anyone who will listen."^[18]
The closing sequence of Alanis Obomsawin's 2014 documentary film Trick or Treaty? is set to Trudell's song "Crazy Horse."^[19]