Maelo en Jazz: Reseña de Miguel Zenón - Sonero

Maelo en Jazz: Reseña de Miguel Zenón - Sonero

El 30 de agosto de 2019 sale a la venta el álbum Sonero, otra joya musical del Maestro Saxofonista Miguel Zenón.

 

Cada una de las grabaciones anteriores de Zenón son ejemplo de su versatilidad, creatividad y genialidad. En su discografia Miguel Zenón nos ha entregado obras maestras en las que ha explorado fusiones del jazz con la bomba, la plena, el bolero, la música jibara y la música clásica. Sonero, es posiblemente, la máxima obra de Miguel Zenón en su ya ilustre carrera musical.

Sonero es una grabación en la que Zenón reinterpreta algunos de los éxitos del cantante conocido como el Sonero Mayor, Ismael Rivera. Sin embargo, Sonero no es una interpretación instrumental fiel y exacta de las canciones de Maelo. En Sonero, Miguel Zenón utiliza extractos de melodías y ritmos de la música de Maelo, como motivos y base para crear exquisitas composiciones de Jazz. El álbum comienza con la voz de Maelo a capella, cantando Ding Ding Dong Dong, una versión de la samba-rock Tim Dom Dom, composición de Joao Mello y Ciodoal do  Brito. La traducción el español es de Tite Curet y fue grabada en una entrevista de Maelo para un programa de Rafi Torres.

'Quítate de la vía Perico' comienza con un ostinato en el saxofón que imita el sonido de un tren hasta llevarnos a la línea melódica del título de la canción original. Zenón pasa a desarrollar fluidas y enérgicas improvisaciones antes de regresar al ostinato con el que comenzó el tema, y dando paso a excelentes improvisaciones en el piano de Luis Perdomo y de Henry Cole en la batería. 'Quitate de la vía Perico' culmina con una repetición acelerada del ostinato y con la línea melódica del coro, "si yo llego a saber que Perico era sordo yo paro el tren".

El piano de Luis Perdomo introduce el sublime y delicado arreglo de 'Las Tumbas'. Zenón retoma la frase melódica del tema mientras Perdomo continúa desarrollando majestuosas improvisaciones en el piano. Zenón demuestra su asombrosa técnica al final antes de retomar la frase melódica.

Zenón crea interesantes variaciones rítmicas y melódicas de algunas de las frases de 'El Negro Bembón'. Las asombrosas y rápidas improvisaciones en el saxofón nos recuerdan porque Zenón es considerado el mejor saxofonista alto de su generación. El pianista Luis Perdomo también tiene una oportunidad de brillar en esta versión de una de las canciones más reconocidas en la voz de Maelo. El 'Negro Bembón' finaliza con un ostinato que lleva a otra frase melódica del tema original.

'La Gata Montesa' es uno de los arreglos más complicados y tal vez menos reconocible para el oyente. Zenón opta por fragmentar y desarrollar varias frases de la canción original popularizada por Maelo a comienzos de la década de 1970.

El swing y base rítmica del bajo de Hans Glawischnig provee la base para los desarrollos melódicos de Miguel Zenón en el saxofón, que van subiendo en intensidad para luego reiterar algunas de las frases y el coro de la canción 'Traigo Salsa'.

Con las melodías de los soneos de Maelo, Miguel Zenón crea la introducción perfecta para el tema 'Las Caras Lindas'. El tema luego pasa a un motif que nos lleva delicadamente a los versos de la canción. Zenón repite parte de la melodía 'Somos la Melaza' sobre una progresión de acordes de parte de Luis Perdomo antes de pasar a deslumbrantes improvisaciones en el saxofón. Miguel retorna los soneos de Maelo para finalizar el tema.

Un ostinato de piano y bajo guía la melodía a través del nostálgico tema 'Hola'. Zenón demuestra en esta interpretación que también es un Maestro en baladas y composiciones que requieren mas espacio y otro tipo de sentimiento en las improvisaciones.

'Colobo' es uno de los arreglos más cercanos a la versión original de Ismael Rivera y es el tema más bailable del álbum. Esta interpretación mantiene el sabor de la Bomba puertorriqueña de la canción que grabó Maelo en la década de 1970. Zenón vuelve a impresionarnos con su capacidad de improvisación y su inagotable creatividad.

'Si te contara' es una de las piezas más hermosas del álbum Sonero. Elegante interpretacion del cuarteto y sublime liricismo de parte de Miguel Zenón en el saxofón. El impecable solo de Hans Glawischnig en el bajo complementa perfectamente la pieza.

El álbum concluye con 'El Nazareno', otro de los clásicos de Maelo. Arreglo rítmico y de gran intensidad en el que se destaca el piano de Luis Perdomo. Zenón utiliza magistralmente varias líneas melódicas que evocan claramente el tema original de Maelo. 

Sonero consolida a Miguel Zenón como uno de los grandes maestros del Jazz Boricua e Internacional.

Miguel Zenón - Saxofón Alto
Luis Perdomo - Piano
Henry Cole - Batería
Hans Glawischnig - Bajo

Coming soon from Impulse Records! & UMe Newly discovered, previously unreleased music from The Classic Quartet

Coming soon from Impulse Records! & UMe
Newly discovered, previously unreleased music from The Classic Quartet

(photo credit – Jim Marshall)

Release Date – September 27, 2019

·         In 1964, the National Film Board of Canada asked John Coltrane to record the soundtrack for a French-language film titled “Le chat dans le sac” (“The Cat in the Bag”).  Amazingly, no announcement was made that the iconic Coltrane was adding new performances to this film.

·         In June of that year, Coltrane’s ‘Classic Quartet’ entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and recorded five previously-recorded Coltrane originals. For many years, viewers of the film who recognized the music thought that they were listening to the original recordings, though in fact they were new and had never been heard.

·         Now, with the release of “Blue World”, we can hear these newly-discovered recordings for the first time.
·         This was recorded in June, 1964 between the recording of “Crescent” and “A Love Supreme”

·         At this time, Coltrane’s music was heading in an avant-garde direction. However, this a more straight-ahead recording.

·         Performed by the Classic Quartet – the same group from “Both Directions at Once” – John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), McCoy Tyner (piano) , Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums).

·         Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

TRACKLIST
CD
01. Naima (Take 1) (4:34)
02. Village Blues (Take 2) (3:41)
03. Blue World (6:08)
04. Village Blues (Take 1) (3:51)
05. Village Blues (Take 3) (3:45)
06. Like Sonny (2:43)
07. Traneing In (7:42)
08. Naima (Take 2) (4:10)

VINYL
SIDE A
01. Naima (Take 1) (4:34)
02. Village Blues (Take 2) (3:41)
03. Blue World (6:08)
04. Village Blues (Take 1) (3:51)
SIDE B
01. Village Blues (Take 3) (3:45)
02. Like Sonny (2:43)
03. Traneing In (7:42)
04. Naima (Take 2) (4:10)

Boricua Jazz La Historia del Jazz Puertorriqueño

Boricua Jazz La Historia del Jazz Puertorriqueño

A la venta en:

Casa Norberto, Plaza Las Américas

Librería Norberto González, Río Piedras

Librería Mágica, Río Piedras

The Bookmark, San Patricio Plaza

Boricua Jazz: La Historia del Jazz Puertorriqueño.

A la venta en:

Amazon

$30 tamaño 7" x 10"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/109610864X

$40 tamaño 8.5" x 11"

https://www.amazon.com/Boricua-Jazz-Historia-Puertorrique%C3%B1o-Hern%C3%A1ndez/dp/1093875313

PDF  ($20) en
https://gumroad.com/l/nFyDQ

#boricuajazz

MIGUEL ZENÓN Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera RELEASE DATE: August 30th, 2019

MIGUEL ZENÓN
Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera

Miguel Zenón, alto
Luis Perdomo, piano
Hans Glawischnig, bass
Henry Cole, drums

ALBUM RELEASE DATE: August 30th, 2019
on MIEL MUSIC

“He wasn’t just one of the guys. For me, he was beyond that” said Miguel Zenón about Ismael (“Maelo”) Rivera (1931-1987), the subject of his latest project, Sonero. “He exemplified the highest level of artistry. He was like Bird, Mozart, Einstein, Ali – he was that guy.”

Zenón knows something about musical greatness. He’s one of jazz’s most original thinkers, known for his harmonic complexity, and for being one of the most recognizable alto saxophonists of his generation. His great subject is his homeland of Puerto Rico, and he brings a fresh take on it every time out, combining reverence for cultural tradition with strong compositional chops. No one else’s Puerto Rico – and no one else’s jazz – sounds like Miguel Zenón’s.

Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera might be Miguel Zenón’s strongest album yet, and that’s saying a lot. For his twelfth album as a leader, Zenón and his quartet offer a tribute to a musician who influenced him from childhood: Ismael Rivera, who grew up in Santurce, not far from Zenón’s home turf. Familiarly known as Maelo, he’s a popular hero in Puerto Rico today, even more than 30 years after his death. “When people talk about him, they talk about him as you would about a legendary figure,” says Zenón. On the other side of the Caribbean, in Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, he’s as popular as he is in Puerto Rico. But in the wider world, he’s not as well known. “One of my main goals here,” Zenón says, “is that I want everyone to know about him.” 

Ismael Rivera’s musical background was in folkloric Afro-Rican music. He grew up together with future bandleader Rafael Cortijo, and became the lead vocalist of Cortijo y Su Combo, with whom he became a household name appearing regularly on the Puerto Rican daily TV El Show del Mediodía in the 1950s. Tutored in the repertoires of bomba and plena by the patriarch Don Rafael Cepeda, the two men stand at the head of a movement that turned those rhythms into contemporary dance-band music, which at the time was mostly in the Cuban style.

Rivera had a distinctly Puerto Rican style of soneo, or improvisation. The word comes from son, the Cuban style of music that is the mother form of salsa. The album’s title, Sonero, means the lead singer who improvises melodies and lyrics over the repeating coro. It’s one of the highest forms of artistic performance, calling on the performer to display musical and textual erudition while making people dance. Rivera was known to his fans as El Sonero Mayor – the greatest sonero.

But, says Zenón, “Sonero to me doesn’t only mean an improviser. It exemplifies a persona. It’s someone who embodies the genre. 

“I grew up in salsa circles as a kid,” he continued, “and when folks talked about all the great singers – Héctor Lavoe and Cheo Feliciano, Marvin Santiago, Chamaco Ramírez, people like that – they always talked about Maelo in a different way. Rubén Blades talks about Maelo as a revolutionary rhythmic genius.” Coming from a percussion background, Rivera developed a unique style of singing that used vocal percussion phrases – ¡rucutúc, rucutúc, rucutúc, rucutác! -- to fill out lyrical lines, making for a new level of rhythmic complexity on the part of the singer.

“Putting phrases on top of phrases, like threes over fours, stuff that’s so advanced that as a musician you can say, ‘okay, that’s five, then the four, then it crosses over and meets here’ – but I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about that,” Zenón says. “He was just thinking about the way he felt it. But what he felt was so advanced and so ahead of his time that it was really transcendent. So a lot of the elements that I used to write these charts were things that were inspired by what he was doing rhythmically when he improvised.”

“I’m attracted to complexity, but in this case it’s complexity on top of a foundation of folklore and just plain grit. It was all there,” he continues. “His timbre, his voice, the way he dealt with lyrics as an improviser and on top of that his rhythmic genius.”

Zenón’s albums are conceived as integral works to an extraordinary degree. He’s been bringing out new full-length projects year after year, and his hyper-virtuosic quartet does hard roadwork playing around the world. On Sonero, the group captures the spirit of Maelo – but through its own distinctive lens. The album has the easily identifiable sound of the fully developed Miguel Zenón Quartet, which has remained with the same membership for fifteen years – an astounding stability in the world of jazz. They play a personalized jazz – their own unique style, collectively created under Zenón’s direction, built on the foundation of their easy musical communication.

The group’s unity was on display when they premiered the music from Sonero in a stunning residency at the Village Vanguard in March 2019. “Luis and Hans and Henry – we all have a specific connection to this music,” Zenón said. “There’s a connection to it that goes beyond the page. It’s a personal thing. Like Luis for example, he’s a salsa head even more than I am. He grew up with this music. When we play the arrangements I’m sure he feels what I feel. He hears those songs and he knows where the source is coming from.”

While the Maelo pieces included in Sonero are Zenón’s arrangements of other composers’ tunes, they’re so fully elaborated into large-scale works that they feel like his compositions. Listeners may recall his arrangement of Maelo’s signature Bobby-Capó-composed soliloquy “Incomprendido” that lit up the quartet’s groundbreaking Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (2011), an album which correctly treated standards by Puerto Rico’s greatest popular composers as part of the jazz repertoire. Sonero brings a similar approach, featuring versions of tunes by some of the same canonical composers from the repertoire of Ismael Rivera.

Some of the selections on Sonero are key tunes from Rivera’s repertoire: “Quítate de la Vía, Perico,” Rivera’s early hit with Cortijo, begins with an accelerating train rhythm; the upbeat feel of Bobby Capó’s “El Negro Bembón,” belies its lyric about the tragedy of a Black man murdered for having big lips; Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso’s Black-is-beautiful anthem “Las Caras Lindas,” – one of Maelo’s signature tunes, covered by many artists; and “El Nazareno,” about his religious experience in the procession of the Black Christ in Portobelo, Panamá, where he was a regular pilgrim.

Others are less obvious choices – “Las Tumbas” (The Tombs), for example, with its lyrics about Rivera’s experience in prison; “Colobó,” about the pleasures of living in Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico’s legendary Black town outside of San Juan where bomba thrives today; and “La Gata Montesa,” a bittersweet bolero-chá about a woman who’s a mountain lion and a “vampiress.”

When Miguel Zenón’s quartet gets to stretching the numbers out live, Sonero is a full evening of entertainment. Unheard but not unacknowledged, the lyrics float in the heads of the musicians as they channel the spirit of Ismael Rivera into their own instrumental masterwork.

About Miguel Zenón

A multiple Grammy® nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, 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. 
http://www.miguelzenon.com/

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