When you see an artist perform, it’s easy to forget that not only are you getting the performer’s music, but his or her entire background as a human being. Alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, who has a resume that includes Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra, as well as being a charter member of the supergroup SF Jazz Collective, has used these musical episodes as well as his upbringing in Puerto Rico to lay he foundation for his burgeoning solo career. His albums like Jibaro and Esta Plena have explored the heart and soul of his country, and his latest release, Alma Adentro, gets to the roots and marrow of Zenon’s musical upbringing, delving into traditional dance music, but with a modern jazz flavor.
Zenon, who is coming to The Broad Stage in Santa Monica in November, sat down with us to reveal to us the musical, cultural and spiritual roots that have made him one of the most in-demand artists around.
HIS FIRST EXPOSURE TO MUSIC
My first experience with music was with classical music. I didn’t actually grow up in a “classical” environment; actually, it was the opposite from that. But when I started taking music lessons it was basically classical through my first six years of study. I didn’t get into jazz until after that. My first musical exposure was popular music. I grew up in a Latin American country, so there was a lot of dance music, folklore music.
HOW HE GOT INTO JAZZ
I discovered jazz through friends at this school I was going to, a Performing Arts School in Puerto Rico. At about my 4th year at school, some friends of mine were playing in a dance band at the school. They started talking to me about Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I didn’t know who they were, so they played me some of their records. I thought it was very impressive, and when I realized that it was all improvised, I was REALLY impressed. I started passing tapes around with my friends. That’s all we had back then. I just became in love with the music, and got into it.
WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF MASTERING JAZZ
The hardest part of it initially was trying to understand it as a language. I didn’t grow up listening to jazz, so at first it was unnatural for me to ‘speak the language.’ To fall into the language, I needed to learn the tradition of it, and learn its history. It was a great experience to get into the music from the ground up, from zero, basically. I still am; it’s still a process.
I went to Berklee for my bachelor’s degree, and that was actually my first experience at formal jazz training. Before that, pretty much everything I knew I had learned on my own, so that was kind of my first experience having a teacher talking about improvisation, and being around people who play jazz.
HOW PLAYING WITH CHARLIE HADEN SHAPED HIS CAREER
I met Charlie many years later, through a friend of mine, drummer Antonio Sanchez. He’d been playing with Pat Metheny for a long while, and Antonio and I had been playing together at Berklee. Pat knew about me, and he told Charlie, and Charlie was looking for an alto player, so he came out to some of my gigs. We talked, and that’s how we got it started.
Charlie has always been one of my heroes. He’s not only one of my favorite bass players, but one of my favorite musicians. Being with him was just one of those situations where you have to just pinch yourself on the arm that it’s actually happening; you’re actually playing with this guy! It’s kind of dream, in many ways, to be playing with a guy like that. When you get to spend time with someone like that, who’s been around so much music, and has been such an integral part of this music, and the history of this music, you learn something new every day. I mean, from experiences back in the day when he was playing all that music with Ornette (Coleman) and Keith (Jarrett), but just talking to him about music and his interests. Then, just playing with him and seeing how he reacts to things. When you play with older musicians, they all have a wider perspective, and they’ve lived through so much. You can’t learn that at any school, it can only happen on stage.
ON GETTING INVOLVED WITH THE SF JAZZ COLLECTIVE
The SF Jazz Collective was actually put together by an organization in San Francisco called Acid Jazz, which is a non-profit organization. They’ve been putting together the SF Jazz Festival for more than 25 years. The idea that they had at the time, along with Joshua Redman (who was the musical director), was to have a band that would represent the state of jazz today. We were trying to get people from different scenes, different age brackets and different musical generations, so that the band would play original music, but would also serve as a platform to pay tribute to the history of jazz and the development of this music. So, what happened about 8 years ago was that I was asked to be one of the founding members of the band. It’s been an incredible experience. I’m actually the one member that is still standing from the first year. It’s been an incredible learning and growing experience to share the stage with many of my heroes. Guys like Joe Lovano, Nicholas Payton , Brian Blade and Renee Rosnes. It’s been an incredible experience for me and I’m just very glad that the band’s still going and trying new and different things and moving forward.
It’s interesting (to be the “elder statesman” of the band), because when I came into the band, I was the youngest guy; in fact I’m STILL one of the youngest guys in the band. I’m beat by one guy! But, because I’ve been in the band for such a long time, the people in the band have given me a sense of seniority, where I get to run the rehearsals, and that’s nice. I enjoy the sense of responsibility, but I think that one thing that’s interesting about the band is that as the band has developed through the years, it has become more and more of a collective thing. It’s more democratic, where there isn’t a “real” leader, and everyone gets to be a leader at certain points. We all kind of share the load. So, even though I’m kind of leading things from “behind the curtains,” at the end of the day, we lead the band together.
FIGHTING THROUGH THE POTENTIAL PROBLEMS OF BEING WITH A BAND COMPRISED OF BANDLEADERS
I think it’s a combination of finding the right people, but also a little bit of luck (to make it work). This kind of thing could be a disaster if you felt everyone pulling their own way and feed their ego. That could happen, but everyone realizes that this band is a different situation than every other band. The idea is that the collective is more important than the individual. Once everyone understands that, it all starts flowing very nicely, cause we’re all thinking the same way.
WHY HE EMPHASIZES PUERTO RICAN MUSIC ON HIS RELEASES
When I got into jazz, my background was basically dance music and folklore. I grew up listening to those things, but I never really studied it; it was just always around me, and I understood what it was, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was musically. So, when I started with jazz, I had to start thinking as a musician, taking my music from the ground up, and once I started writing my own music, I realized that even though I’ve grown up with all of this traditional dance music that was from Puerto Rico, I didn’t understand it, so I made a point to approach it the same way I did with jazz; to study the history and tradition of it and its development musically, and try to see what I could take from it, and incorporate it into my own music. That’s how these projects were born. Esta Plena was a tribute to a specific style of music, called Plena Music, in Puerto Rico, very percussive. We actually did a record a couple of years before, called Jibaro, which was a tribute was another kind of music, from the mountains, which was more rural. This record that we just did was an exercise in the Puerto Rican songbook; the music of all of the great songwriters that have come out of Puerto Rico, and who’ve written all of these timeless compositions. We tried to see if we could use them and incorporate them into what we usually do in the band. It’s a little bit different than the other ones in the sense that for the other albums, although we were exploring various types of music folklore, I was doing all of the writing. I was always thinking of jazz in my composing, but using the plena music as a base. Whereas, in this new recording I’m basically arranging songs, as if I’m doing a record of jazz standards. I kind of see it in that way, but I’m just approaching the Great Puerto Rican Songbook the same way others might do the Great American Songbook. Instead of a song by Kern or Gershwin, I’m doing music I know very well, so it’s a different process.
AS ART BLAKEY SAID, “ALL JAZZ IS DANCE MUSIC,”
I have to say, that I got into music through this kind of feeling, that you would play to make people dance. That was my first experience as a working musician. My first gigs when I was 14 was playing dance music, so my experience came from the idea that what you play had to make people move. I think that especially the last couple of years, I’ve been going back to that more and more. Going back to that feeling that it doesn’t matter what you play; it could be the most complicated thing rhythmically, melodically or harmonically, or whatever. But you gotta have a connection through that dance element. It is just something that feels natural to me. It’s something that’s connected to the history of jazz. It’s not like I’m saying, “All jazz has to be this,” but to me, it feels natural to be connected to the dance element.
TO ZENON, MUSIC IS ALSO A FORM OF EDUCATION
I’ve been teaching the last couple years, doing it more and more. I’ve been teaching at a conservatory, and I’ve had opportunities to teach at different seminars at various places throughout the world. I had this idea a couple of years ago, a project of arranging free jazz concerts in the rural areas of Puerto Rico. The purposes were to try to bring jazz music in there, and try to eliminate any financial element or pre-conceived notions of what jazz was, and the kind of people that were supposed to enjoy it. Basically show them that this is music like any other music, and anyone can enjoy it. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve heard it before or not. So, the concerts are free, and anybody can come. We do a pre concert presentation about the history of jazz, and the music that they’re about to hear. That way, people feel more comfortable about the music they’re about to hear, and then they can choose what they like after they hear it, and say, “I just heard music of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.”
We choose rural areas because they don’t get much cultural activity, so we’re bringing jazz into areas that would usually never get a chance to be exposed to something like this. So, I’m making a cultural investment in my country, and doing it with the music that I love, and that I’ve been working with the last decade or so; it’s been very fulfilling. We actually have some concerts coming up there. We already did one in February with the music of Miles Davis, one in June with the music of Charlie Parker, and we have another one coming up in October doing the music of Ornette Coleman. I try to bring a different band every time. Guys like Gerald Clayton and Kendrick Scott and Nasheet waits. The people have been loving it. It’s a lot of work, but very fulfilling.
WHAT MOTIVATES YOU AS AN ARTIST AND A HUMAN
I think I have a sincere love for music. It’s what I breathe every day; everything I do is towards the goal of getting better, and enjoying music more and more. Especially when I listen to other people play, people of my generation, my peers doing so many great things, and so many great composers. It’s inspiring to me. It’s a motivation, out of love, and out of a desire to get better.
I also read the Bible for inspiration. I’m a Christian; I’ve been going to church since I was little, and it’s a big part of my life. Through the years I’ve learned a way to balance it in what I do, in the sense that I see it as a personal connection with this Higher Being, God. I think that it’s the kind of thing that if you’re sincere with this kind of connection, it can be nothing but positive. For me, it’s something that surpasses anything that comes from the human side. It’s something that many times is just above our understanding. It’s a side of you that fulfills you, and brings something into your life that you know should be there. I go to The New York Times Square Church. I’ve been going there for years. I try to stay on top of it, and keep that connection.
THE VALUE OF CONNECTING TO PEOPLE MUSICALLY AND SPIRTUALLY THROUGH A CHURCH
The church is very representative of the city; people from all walks of life. It’s very cosmopolitan. I think that the message the church has is very clear and precise. It’s about your relationship with God, and how that should make you a better person, and that should make you grow. It’s not about imposing things on someone or achieving prosperity, it’s just about sharing your life with God.
They’ve got a very good band! The way that I discovered that church was through a good friend of mine, an incredible sax player Greg Tardy. He invited me, and at the time, there was a sax player in the band that had been in Wynton Marsalis’ band, Todd Williams. He was playing tenor. After he moved out of the city, Greg got in the band for a long time and was conducting it. Greg moved to Tennessee to get a teaching job, so they get some good musicians there!
WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM YOUR NEXT TOUR
It’s most likely to be music from the new record, but we’re always working on something new, so there will be some surprises as well. Something’s always in the works.