Publication: All About Jazz
Author: Dan Bilawsky
Date: August 21, 2011

When so-called “Latin jazz” comes up in conversation, music or musicians connected to Cuba or Brazil are usually the topic of conversation. While it’s true that Afro-Cuban stylings, bossa nova beats and sizzling samba numbers seem to dominate in this umbrella category, they’re only the tip of the iceberg that is the music of Latin America. Thankfully, some important jazz musicians are helping to broaden the rest of the world’s view on what Latin America has to offer. Pianist Danilo Perez has connected the dots between music from his native Panama and jazz, and alto saxophone star Miguel Zenón is doing the same thing for Puerto Rico.

While calling somebody a “star” in jazz might seem like an oxymoron, when considering the lower-than-deserved profile of the genre on the national and international stages, Zenón fits the bill like few others. Read more »

Publication: Seattle Weekly Blogs
Author: Chris Kornelis
Date: August 30, 2011

Earlier today I had a long chat with saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who just released, with the piano player Joey Calderazzo, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy—an album of instrumentals played with a warmth and melody usually the domain of vocalists. But Marsalis was much more interested in discussing general ideas related to jazz and pop music than he was pitching his new record (though he certainly thinks very highly of it).

Many of Marsalis’ comments directed at the jazz community could just as easily be applied to the insular “world inside a world” you can find inside the indie rockosphere, to say nothing of punk, pop, and hip-hop. He’s got a point: If the most important music being made today isn’t reaching an audience, is it really important?

Here’s an excerpt from our chat:

Marsalis: I have a lot of normal friends. ‘Cause it’s important. [New York is] a weird city where actors date actors, lawyers date lawyers, musicians date musicians, it’s real strange that way. You have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what’s good and what’s not good, and they don’t consider the larger context of it, and the larger context of it is that, you know . . . Read more »

Publication: New York Times
Author: Ben Ratliff
Date: August 29, 2011

Miguel Zenón
“Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook”
(Marsalis Music)

The alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón is identifiable by his tone, which is floaty and bright and ornate; sometimes he sounds as if he’s playing a ballad even when the tempo races. But he’s also become identifiable by the quality of ideas, his particular kind of intellectual ambition.

Since his first album 10 years ago he’s become something like a perfect student, the perpetually self-challenging kind. Mr. Zenón, born and raised in Puerto Rico and living in New York — and a 2008 MacArthur Foundation award winner — could make an endless stream of contemporary jazz if he wanted to, rhythmically complicated, perfectly new, perfectly cloistered. Read more »