Acclaimed saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón and his
longstanding quartet embark on an international tour from July 1-15 with stops
in France, Spain, Poland, Switzerland, and China. The band is the same lineup
featured in Zenón's latest release Típico (February 2017 Miel Music): pianist
Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Henry Cole.
o Saturday, July 1, Jazz a Oloron, 10 Rue de Revol,
Oloron-Sainte-Marie, France.
o Sunday, July 2, Bogui Jazz, Calle de Barquillo, 29, 28004
Madrid, Spain.
o Thursday & Friday, July 6-7, Le Duc des Lombards, 42
Rue des Lombards, Paris, France.
o Saturday, July 8, La Cité du Vin, 134 Quai de Bacalan,
Bordeaux, France.
o Sunday, July 9, Summer Jazz Days, Warsaw, Poland.
o Monday, July 10, Musique en été, Geneva, Switzerland.
o Friday & Saturday, July 14-15, Blue Note, Beijing,
China.
A multiple Grammy® nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur
Fellow, Miguel 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.
Tipico is above all a celebration of Zenón's longstanding
quartet. His past several releases have generally fleshed out that core unit
with additional instrumentalists as Zenón has looked outward to explore various
aspects of his Puerto Rican heritage. Tipico feels more intimate. Its focus
stays closer to home, with nods to Zenón's own personal and professional life
as it zeroes in on what makes his band unique.
"I was thinking about what this band and the guys in
the band mean to me as I was writing the music," he explains. "I kept
going back to this idea of us developing this common language that identifies
us as a band."
That language has been developing for more than a decade.
Pianist Luis Perdomo and bassist Hans Glawischnig have been with Zenón since
the turn of the millennium; Henry Cole joined the band in 2005. Their language
is thoroughly fluent modern jazz, with all the instrumental prowess and
rhythmic and harmonic complexity that that implies. But the dialect they've
created together through the years is distinctive.
Zenón
"'Típico' refers to something that's customary to a
region or a group of people," Zenón says. "Or something that can be
related to a specific group of people. And when I was writing the music, I was
thinking about music that identified us and this band."
Each of the album's final three tracks, Zenón notes, was
composed around a solo or signature rhythmic line that one of the band members
had played before. "My approach was more systematic on those three
compositions specifically. But the whole record essentially is about
representing the sound of the band. The sound of our band."
The album opens with "Academia," a tune inspired
by Zenón's teaching at New England Conservatory, where he serves as part of the
jazz faculty. "One of the great things about teaching at NEC is that I get
the opportunity to create a personalized curriculum for each of my private
students, depending on their needs and on what I feel they should be working
on. So I find myself having to come up with new exercises constantly, in order
to keep our interactions interesting and challenging. This composition is built
around various harmonic and rhythmic exercises that I developed with some of my
more recent students at the school."
The second track, "Cantor," honors Zenón's friend
and frequent collaborator Guillermo Klein. "Gullermo's music has a very
personal voice, something very unique. With this piece I was trying to convey
some of what I feel are his most interesting qualities as a composer, like the
lyrical character of his melodies and the very nuanced harmonic movement of his
pieces. He also has very particular way of organizing the 3/4 bar, which he
breaks down into three bars of 7/8 and one bar of 3/8. The piece touches on
this a bit towards the end, sort of as a way of tipping my hat to a great
friend and musician."
The third and fourth tracks both stem from Zenón pondering
what gives a particular song a folkloric feel. "Ciclo" emphasizes
melody and rhythm, Zenón taking"a melody that is meant to sound very
folkloric - a bit simpler harmonically and delineating a very specific
beat" and building a complex extended cycle around it using smaller,
interlocking rhythmic cells.
"Típico" approaches its folkloric aims
harmonically. "There's a harmonic cadence that is very common in Latin
American music, especially music in the Caribbean. Something that revolves
around a minor key and then slides down, going 'Subdominant Minor - Tonic Minor
- Dominant - Tonic Minor.' A very simple cadence, but one that is very unique
and effective. It's always caught my ear because I'm always on the lookout for
things that serve as sort of musical connecting threads, things that makes me
feel that the music from all these different countries and cultural expressions
is somehow connected and coming out of the same combination of elements. I
built this specific composition around this cadence, and called it
"Típico" in reference to this Pan-American idea."
"Sangre Di Me Sangre" is a tune the quartet has
been playing for a while now, a balladic tribute to Zenón's 4-year-old
daughter, Elena, written before her first birthday. "I was sitting in this
park with her," he recalls. "She was playing around and I sat down
and sketched out the song on my notepad." Zenón wrote the piece first with
lyrics, then orchestrated it for the quartet, featuring Glawischnig's bass both
on a sprightly introductory melody played in unison with Perdomo and on a solo
meant to convey a singing quality.
Glawischnig is also featured on "Corteza," its
melody derived from Zenón's transcription of his bass solo opening the track
"Calle Calma" on the 2009 Zenónalbum Esta Plena. It, too, has a
balladic feel, with lyrical solos from Zenón and Perdomo leading to a closing
uptempo restatement of the theme.
The Perdomo feature "Entre Las Raíces"
("Amongst the Roots") is more fiery, emphasizing two key facets of
the pianist's musical personality. The intricate melody he and Zenón whip
through together was transcribed from a Perdomo solo on "Street View:
Biker," the opening track on Perdomo's album Awareness. But this
arrangement opens with Perdomo playing wild and free, and Zenón's alto solo
when it comes reveals a free side of his own, veering more toward Ornette
Coleman or Albert Ayler.
"The piece is very free in terms of the way we deal
with the improvised segments," says Zenón. "Luis always talks about
listening to Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor at the same time when he was growing
up in Caracas, and always having a foot in this freer, avant-gardish world of
jazz. And when you hear him play on that track, it sounds that way. For that
piece specifically, he really sounds like he's 100 percent in his
element."
Cole's playing is suitably free on "Entre Las
Raíces" as well, but his featured track, "Las Ramas" ("The
Branches," Cole's own debut album having been titled "Roots Before
Branches"), required more discipline. "I wrote the piece around this
figure that he has been developing over the last few years and plays all the
time," says Zenón. "The piece is very difficult to play - sort of
like an etude for the drums, pretty much. And I know he worked very hard on it.
Even though the original idea came from him, he worked very hard on making it
precise and making it clean, and really sounded amazing on this track."
It's no accident that the final three songs are named for
parts of a tree. "I was thinking of the band as a tree," Zenón
acknowledges. "And thinking of myself as the watcher. I mean, I'm part of
it also. But mostly I'm observing these amazing musicians night after night,
and how together they kind of make up this livingorganism."
Zenón is onto something with that metaphor. The spotlight
cast by Típico illuminates how alive his quartet's music has always been, while
never ceasing to evolve and grow.
