Miguel Zenon
Tipico
(Miel Music)

Miguel Zenon featuring Spektral Quartet
Yo Soy La Tradicion
(Miel Music)

MIGUEL ZENON’S musical heart has never left his country of birth and it beats powerfully through all his performances and albums like the 2016 album Tipico, on which he is joined by Hans Glawischnig, Luis Perdomo and drummer Henry Cole.

Zenon has written all the album’s tunes and every track shows the Caribbean roots of his artistry.
Folk-inspired, they provide tremendous zest and a sense of hope to Zenon’s horn and to Perdomo’s fast-flowing, rippling piano runs which extend and harmonise the sounds of Latin American freedom.

Sangre de mi Sangre is a melody which Zenon plays with simplicity and an uncomplicated lucidity, his notes falling in cadences like sonic petals. Glawischnig’s bass tunnels below Cole’s tapping drumsticks, while on Corteza Zenon’s notes drop like gentle rain.

Entre las Raices has the pianist’s notes running like a wild stream and Las Ramas begins with a whistled melody — like a labourer returning home from work — is repeated and developed by Zenon’s saxophone, a fitting way of ending the album.

The album Yo Soy la Tradicion is even more folk-inspired and draws on jazz, Puerto Rican folklore and New Music in what Zenon describes as a “chamber-like context.” To help him create it, he’s joined by Spektral String Quartet, to make a band of five expressing the 200 years of musical and cultural traditions from Zenon’s native land.

On Cadenas, with its origins in folk poetry and dance, Zenon’s horn rises out of the repeated strings riff in joyous choruses and dances on his reed. Yumas, one of several tunes with origins in the Jibaro 10-line rhyming stanza tradition, unifies poetry and sonic lyricism, with Zenon turning words into notes with beautiful aplomb as the quartet pluck their strings in showers of sound.

The album ends with Villabeno, named after the town, with its slower, cello-emphatic opening. Zenon plays with a deeply reflective, blues-tinged sadness, raising his horn to a buoyant serenity, concluding a brilliant and loving jazz-inflected insight into Puerto Rican folklore.