Miguel Zenon
Golden City
Miel Music
★★★★★

MIGUEL ZENON’S alto saxophone is a truly golden sound of US jazz, and carries with it his love for his own Puerto Rico and for struggling people across the continent.

Golden City is an album containing his reflections of San Francisco, its people and history. Beginning with Sacred Land, his tribute to the Ohlone, the indigenous people of northern California, he continues by playing tunes telling the stories of the Acts of Exclusion against Chinese labourers in 1882; and the track 9066, the number of the executive order incarcerating 120,000 Japanese-Americans in 1942.

With other virtuoso musicians like valve trombonist Diego Urcola, pianist Matt Mitchell, guitarist Miles Okazaki and percussionist Daniel Diaz, Zenon’s horn also sings of Frisco’s reputation as a city of sanctuary, and in The Power of Community, its organisations still fighting every day for civil rights: a now-times musical jewel of living history.

Angelica Sanchez/Chad Taylor
a monster is just an animal you haven’t met yet
Intakt Records
★★★★

RECORDED with resonating sound in Brooklyn, this duo album by two Arizonans, pianist Angelica Sanchez and drummer Chad Taylor, is a tryst of marvellously open and striking musicianship.

The co-operative spirit of these two virtuosi is explosive throughout — hear the mysteriously animated note patterns of Holding Presence in Time, for example, where the twosome anticipate each other’s phrases and conjunctions with such intuitive power, or the longest track, Myopic Seer, where there seem to be two drummers drumming, such are the percussive sonics that stream from Sanchez’s piano.

There’s a very particular hot and dry excitation coming from the timbre of this session, as if these two have taken the essence of their state, its landscape and climate, into the heartsblood of their music. As Sanchez plucks her piano’s innards in the title piece the sound suddenly desertifies into a unique soundscape, inventive and provocative.

Paul Dunmall
Red Hot Ice
Discus Music
★★★★★

NOW a non-stopping septuagenarian, tenor saxophonist and multi-hornman Paul Dunmall recorded his album Red Hot Ice with a nine-piece band in Birmingham.

A jazz pacifist, although he plays with a powerful sense of attack on all his horns, he begins with Prepare for Peace, an eternal theme of his music. He can roar and rumble like a now-times Illinois Jacquet, or turn improvising truth into gentle balladry like a reincarnated Ben Webster. But more than anything, he creates absolutely his own sound.

The band supplements his large timbre with a powerful empathy, Percy Pursglove’s crystal trumpet, James Owston’s dancing bass and Alicia Gardener-Trejo’s delving baritone sax, adding even more exuberance, as the ensemble really swings through Say Hi to Your Evil.

It’s a rocking path to take into your seventies, and Dunmall rampages with aplomb, in this hugely inventive session from the heart of England.