Nice interview in todays New York Times about Miguel Zenons new album, which was released today. See him at the Clifton Center this Friday at 8:00! Check out the review: MIGUEL ZENóN “Identities Are Changeable” (Miel) For at least the last decade, the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón has organized most of his music around a thematic axis: the cultural and folkloric expressions of Puerto Rico, his homeland. “Identities Are Changeable,” his steeply ambitious new album, shifts the perspective slightly, interrogating the experiences of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Mr. Zenón, 37, was born in San Juan and has lived in New York since 1998. But his focus with this work, a sprawling song cycle that had its debut presentation in 2012, isn’t autobiographical: It began with a series of interviews, eliciting testimonials of belonging and in-betweenness and fluidity. The title comes from an assertion made by one of the interviewees, Juan Flores, a social theorist whose recent book, “The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning,” partly inspired the project. There’s a lot of ground to cover here, and Mr. Zenón does his part, interspersing snippets of interview audio throughout a dynamic, large-ensemble composition, featuring what he calls the “Identities” Big Band. The writing is potent and self-assured, girded with polyrhythmic cross talk — multiple meters churning in irregular union — and given to steadily mounting drama. (A live performance of the piece, among the highlights of this year’s Newport Jazz Festival, will be webcast on Wednesday night at NPR.org.) The sweeping intelligence of Mr. Zenón’s big-band arrangements, which occasionally nod toward recent advances in the field made by Guillermo Klein and Darcy James Argue, could have carried this agenda alone, without spoken-word overlay. At times, notably on the title track, the music and words seem to compete for attention. But Mr. Zenón also puts the interview clips to structural use. An anthemic track titled “Through Culture and Tradition” deftly reworks the phrase “bomba y plena,” referring to two related forms of island folk music. “My Home” does something similar with the English phrases “Spend some time in Puerto Rico” and “Back to my homeland,” incorporating their speech cadences in a melody articulated, with his usual expressive charisma, by Mr. Zenón. The voices are conversational, and more or less anonymous, despite a roll call in the piece’s overture. (One exception: Sonia Manzano will be instantly familiar to anyone who grew up watching “Sesame Street,” on which she plays Maria.) Mr. Zenón, who’ll present this music in small-group form at the Village Vanguard from Nov. 18 through 23, is chasing a conviction here: the story of a people can only be understood in the plural. NATE CHINEN
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 14:35:14 +0000
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