“IT WASN'T until I started to write my own music and conceptualise what I wanted to do as a musician that I started to consider my musical roots,” says the beautifully fluid alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon.

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Born in San Juan in 1976 to music-loving parents, he was brought up in the capital’s largest housing project.

He started playing saxophone at a performing arts school at the age of 11 and went on to study classical saxophone for six years. He began playing salsa and merengue dance music, then discovered Charlie Parker and jazz. “He was truly my first jazz inspiration and opened the door to a life fully immersed in music,” he says.

Yet he loves folk music too because “it feels real and unique, coming directly from my people — you wouldn’t learn it in a school or conservatory.”

As a boy, his hero was singer Ismael Rivera, who grew up very close to his neighbourhood. “I connected with his music as soon as I heard it,” he recalls. “We all idolised him. He was a mythical figure, larger than life — all over Latin America too, in Panama, Venezuela and Colombia.”

It’s no surprise, then, that that Zenon’s latest album Sonero is a tribute to Rivera. With bandleader Rafael Contigo, with whom he grew up, he changed the face of Latin American popular music, infusing it with Afro-Puerto Rican sounds of bomba and plena.

“He was also a nationalist, culturally and politically, believing, like many Puerto Ricans, that Puerto Rico should be an independent country,” Zenon stresses.

Sonero features some of Zenon’s favourite musicians. Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo is a brilliant kindred spirit and like Zenon a “salsa head,” while Austrian Hans Glawischnig is a pulsating, empathetic bassist and Henry Cole, a Puerto Rican too, is a rampant drummer.

Zenon says that he is attracted to complexity but in Rivera’s case, “it’s complexity on top of a foundation of folklore and just plain grit.” He loves Rivera’s voice and the way he improvised with his lyrics, along with his rhythmic genius.

All those elements are there on Sonero, together with Zenon’s love of lucid melody. Perdomo’s lyrical piano rings out in Las Tumbas before Zenon takes flight. El Negro Bembon, about a racist murder, has an ironic fleeting velocity, with the final pounding toms of Cole and Zenon’s repetitive riff signalling a hidden tragedy.

I asked him how Puerto Rico was coping with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and Trump’s contemptuous dismissal of its people. But while Zenon’s compatriots are troubled by the current state of affairs he’s just hoping that “as a nation, we can keep fighting to take control of our destiny and push things forward.”

That’s what Zenon’s music achieves on Sonero with its Caribbean beauty, love for the common people and consciousness of its musical defiance.