“He wasn’t just one of the guys. For me, he was beyond that”
said Miguel Zenón about Ismael (“Maelo”) Rivera (1931-1987), the
subject of his latest project, Sonero. “He exemplified the highest level of artistry. He
was like Bird, Mozart, Einstein, Ali – he was
that guy.”
Zenón knows something about musical greatness. He’s one of
jazz’s most original thinkers, known for his harmonic complexity, and for being
one of the most recognizable alto saxophonists of his generation. His great
subject is his homeland of Puerto Rico, and
he brings a fresh take on it every time out, combining reverence for cultural
tradition with strong compositional chops. No one else’s Puerto Rico – and no
one else’s jazz – sounds like Miguel Zenón’s.
Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera might be Miguel Zenón’s strongest album yet, and that’s
saying a lot. For his twelfth album as a leader, Zenón and his quartet offer a
tribute to a musician who influenced him from childhood: Ismael Rivera, who
grew up in Santurce, not far from Zenón’s home turf. Familiarly known as Maelo,
he’s a popular hero in Puerto Rico today, even more than 30
years after his death. “When people talk about him, they talk about him as you
would about a legendary figure,” says Zenón. On the other side of the
Caribbean, in Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, he’s as popular as he is in Puerto
Rico. But in
the wider world, he’s
not as well known. “One of my main goals here,” Zenón says, “is that I want
everyone to know about him.”
Ismael Rivera’s musical background was in folkloric
Afro-Rican music. He grew up together with future bandleader Rafael Cortijo,
and became the lead vocalist of Cortijo y Su Combo,
with whom he became a
household name appearing regularly on the Puerto Rican daily TV
El Show del Mediodía in the 1950s. Tutored in the
repertoires of bomba and plena by the patriarch Don Rafael Cepeda, the two
men stand at the head of a movement that turned those rhythms into contemporary
dance-band music, which at the time was mostly in the Cuban style.
Rivera had a distinctly Puerto Rican style of soneo, or improvisation. The word comes from son, the Cuban
style of music that is the mother form of salsa. The album’s title, Sonero, means the lead singer who improvises melodies and
lyrics over the repeating coro. It’s one of the highest forms of artistic performance,
calling on the performer to display musical and textual erudition while making
people dance. Rivera was known to his fans as
El Sonero Mayor – the greatest sonero.
But, says Zenón, “Sonero to me doesn’t only mean an
improviser. It exemplifies a persona. It’s someone who embodies the genre.
“I grew up in salsa circles as a kid,” he continued, “and
when folks talked about all the great singers – Héctor Lavoe and Cheo
Feliciano, Marvin Santiago, Chamaco Ramírez, people like that – they always
talked about Maelo in a different way. Rubén Blades
talks about Maelo as a revolutionary rhythmic genius.” Coming from a percussion
background, Rivera developed a unique style of singing that used vocal
percussion phrases – ¡rucutúc, rucutúc, rucutúc, rucutác! — to fill out lyrical
lines, making for a new level of rhythmic complexity on the part of the singer.
“Putting phrases on top of phrases, like threes over fours,
stuff that’s so advanced that as a musician you can say, ‘okay, that’s five,
then the four, then it crosses over and meets here’ – but I’m sure he wasn’t
thinking about that,” Zenón
says. “He was just thinking about the way he felt it. But what he felt was so
advanced and so ahead of his time that it was really transcendent. So a lot of
the elements that I used to write these charts were things that were inspired
by what he was doing
rhythmically when he improvised.”
“I’m attracted to complexity, but in this case it’s
complexity on top of a foundation of folklore and just plain grit. It was all there,” he continues. “His timbre, his
voice, the way he dealt with lyrics as an improviser and on top of that his
rhythmic genius.”
Zenón’s albums are conceived as integral works to an
extraordinary degree. He’s been bringing out new full-length projects year
after year, and his hyper-virtuosic quartet does hard roadwork playing around
the world. On Sonero, the group captures the spirit of Maelo – but through
its own distinctive lens.The album has the easily identifiable sound of the fully
developed Miguel Zenón Quartet, which has remained with the same membership for
fifteen years – an astounding stability in the world of jazz. They play a
personalized jazz – their own unique style, collectively created
under Zenón’s direction, built on the foundation of their easy musical
communication.
The group’s unity was on display when they premiered the music
from Sonero in a stunning residency at the Village Vanguard in
March 2019. “Luis and Hans and Henry – we all have a specific connection to
this music,” Zenón said. “There’s a connection to it that goes beyond the page.
It’s a personal thing. Like Luis for
example, he’s a salsa head even more than I am. He grew up with this music.
When we play the arrangements I’m sure he feels what I feel. He hears those
songs and he knows where the source is coming from.”
While the Maelo pieces included in Sonero are Zenón’s arrangements of other composers’ tunes,
they’re so fully elaborated into large-scale works that they feel like his
compositions. Listeners may recall his arrangement of Maelo’s signature
Bobby-Capó-composed soliloquy “Incomprendido” that lit up the
quartet’s groundbreaking Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (2011), an album which correctly treated standards by Puerto
Rico’s greatest popular composers as part of the jazz repertoire. Sonero brings a similar approach, featuring versions of tunes
by some of the same canonical composers from the repertoire of Ismael Rivera.
Some of the selections on Sonero are key tunes from Rivera’s
repertoire: “Quítate de la Vía, Perico,” Rivera’s early hit with Cortijo,
begins with an accelerating train rhythm; the upbeat
feel of Bobby Capó’s
“El Negro Bembón,” belies its lyric about the tragedy of a Black man murdered
for having big lips; Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso’s Black-is-beautiful anthem
“Las Caras Lindas,” – one of Maelo’s signature tunes, covered by many artists; and “El Nazareno,”
about his religious experience in the procession of the Black Christ in
Portobelo, Panamá, where he was a regular pilgrim.
Others are less obvious choices – “Las Tumbas” (The Tombs),
for example, with its lyrics about Rivera’s experience in prison; “Colobó,”
about the pleasures of living in Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico’s legendary Black
town outside of San Juan where
bomba thrives today; and “La Gata Montesa,” a bittersweet bolero-chá about a
woman who’s a mountain lion and a “vampiress.”
When Miguel Zenón’s quartet gets to stretching the numbers
out live, Sonero is a full evening of entertainment. Unheard but not
unacknowledged, the lyrics
float in the heads of
the musicians as they channel the spirit of Ismael Rivera into their own
instrumental masterwork.
A multiple Grammy® nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur
Fellow, Zenón is one of a select group of musicians who have masterfully
balanced and blended the often contradictory poles of innovation and tradition.
Widely considered one of the most
groundbreaking and
influential saxophonists of his generation, Zenón has also developed a unique
voice as a composer and as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on
perfecting a fine mix between Latin American folkloric music and jazz. Born and
raised in San Juan, Puerto
Rico, Zenón has recorded and toured with a wide variety of musicians including
Charlie Haden, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner, Bobby Hutcherson and Steve Coleman
and is a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective.
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