Miguel Zenon builds a bridge from his Puerto Rican soul to the world

 

Pianist Luis Perdomo and saxophonist Miguel Zenon shared an intimate experience of the deepest feelings and highest art. All photos by Jim Kreul courtesy Arts + Lit Lab

MADISON JAZZ FESTIVAL Review, Vol. 2

Miguel Zenon and Luis Perdomo

Arts + Literature Lab, June 13

As a critic, it is far from my wont to walk away from a concert with the utterance that tripped forth from my lips after a duet performance last week by alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon and pianist Louis Perdomo. But I said it, “I think I just died and went to heaven,” the hoary cliché clunking about shamelessly.

And therein lies the rub, I’ve concluded. You see, I really was experiencing something deliriously pleasurable during this concert. No question, Miguel Zenon, a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, is a monumental artist. He has emerged in recent years exploring with ardent, rigorous intelligence and reflection the cultural and historical legacy of his native Puerto Rico and Latin America in music and song. His 2014 album Identities are Changeable won numerous awards including this writer’s best jazz album of the year, for its exploration of the permeable ways that Puerto Rican and other Latinx New Yorkers see themselves. As I commented in my Culture Currents, it explores the “increasingly bifurcated nature of racial and national identity in America, typified no more strikingly than in our Puerto Rican culture.” Zenon interviewed and recorded numerous people in New York City and Puerto Rico and their testimony about fluidity and duality of identity rings fresh and true. “I think more people are realizing that you can be more than one cultural self at the same time,” comments Juan Flores.

And last year’s Zenon’s Musicas de las Americas probed with fascinating depth the innermost byways of Pan-American culture, especially focusing on the consequences of colonization.

By contrast, the album performed at this month’s Madison Jazz Festival, El Arte Del Bolero, seems less ambitious but in the experience proved no less consequential, at least emotionally, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually. It’s an album of duets by arguably Zenon’s closest collaborator, pianist Louis Perdomo, and comprises songs traversing their lifetimes, “songs from the times of our parents and grandparents… As essential to our development as the music of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or Thelonious Monk, but perhaps even more familiar,” Zenon explains in the liner. “When we play these songs, we can hear the lyrics in the backs of our minds – something that provides a very deep connection, one that is hard to replicate in any other situation. It is beyond familiar. These songs are part of us.”

The Arts + Literature Lab in Madison, where Zenon and Perdomo performed, is a multi-purpose art gallery/arts and literature workshop/concert space.

The effect, in a jazz sense, manifested the ease of musical quotation as natural as breathing for them, and best exemplified historically by tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

So, if the songs seem simple compared to modern jazz that’s only a superficial quality. The musicians brought a lifetime of listening and music-loving to these, as elemental as their birthrights. The sheer beauty and ardent passion they infused them with captivated us. Many of these songs compared to the finest Tin Pan Alley melodies and one recalled “The Shadow of your Smile.”

Lyricism rarely gets much finer. That and the lack of drums lent an intimacy comparable to a hand laid in your own, or arms embracing, even a kiss. Yet for all the tenderness, the musicians filled their sweet cups with the protein of creative jazz. The mind was lit as much as the heart in song after song, which were mostly big hits in Latin America in their day.

Also, a dialectical power hovered that is almost excruciating, as exemplified by “La Vida Es Un Sueno,” written by Arsenio Rodriguez.

The title translates as “Life is a dream,” but that phrase is deceptive, snuggling up to bucolic notions. In a press release, Zenon explains that the closing lyrics of the song convey his sentiment as well as anything:

La realidad es nacer y morir
por qué llenarnos de tanta ansiedad
todo no es más que un eterno sufrir
y el mundo está hecho de infelicidad.

por qué llenarnos de tanta ansiedad
todo no es más que un eterno sufrir
y el mundo está hecho de infelicidad.

That translates into English as:

The reality is to be born and die
because filling us with so much anxiety.

everything is nothing more than an eternal suffering
and the world is made of unhappiness.

That, and the rest of the lyric, may be too bitter a cup to swallow for many comfortable gringos. But slavery, racism and colonialism have normalized that reality for countless Latinos, as well as African-Americans. And here Zenon’s horn let loose with utterly anguished moans, remembrance of deep-scared experience.

So, Zenon and Perdomo hardly diminish the pang of Rodriguez’s sentiments, but their playing proved as artful an anodyne as one could hope for, a salve to the suffering soul and, Lord knows, we all suffer, thus the universality of the music, even as it enlightened us.

Zenon possesses an alto sax tone all his own, though one can imagine a blend of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, the latter lending a dryness to the former’s “sweet rain.” His inventiveness seems as inexorable as a waterfall.

And pianist Perdomo is as harmonically blessed as any pianist while capable of rhapsodic and sensual skimmings of the skin, with his classical training.

As for me, I had recently recovered from Covid positivity yet was still struggling with the lingering Covid fog, which affects one’s mood, lucidity, energy, and psyche. Yet memory of the music remains vivid. Indeed, El Arte del Bolero was conceived and first performed during the pandemic and that experience, along with those embedded in the composers’ songs, fueled the profound melancholy permeating these exquisite, sometimes soul-wracking utterances. So I wrestled with the strength of these emotions as I bathed in them, awash in the complexity of their poignant and plangent textures. I thank higher powers for the music’s all-too-human qualities, even as it buzzed my brain in the stimulating setting of The Arts + Literature Laboratory’s art gallery/concert space.

El Arte Del Bolero will stay with me like a tattoo on my soul, and I’ve never been happier to be so “defaced.” Indeed, I’m facing the sun with no fear of burning, even if the pain can be all too real.

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  1. Arsenio Rodriguez, “La Vida Es Un Sueño,” https://www.cancioneros.com/lyrics/song/29825/la-vida-es-un-sueno-arsenio-rodriguez

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pianist Tim Whalen brings his powerful tribute to Bud Powell to the Jazz Estate

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Cover design for Tim Whalen’s “Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell” by Jamie Breiwick for  B-Side Graphics. Courtesy www.timothywhalen.com

Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell – Tim Whalen (WayHay Music)

The Tim Whalen Trio will perform on Thursday, April 6 at The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee.

“Oblivion,” the title of a Bud Powell tune, might be the single best word to describe the great pianist’s sad legacy. His name is in need of desperate repair, ravaged by the winds of time and his own peculiar fate. Pianist-composer Tim Whalen has gone a considerable distance in accomplishing that with his album Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell. But we must backtrack a bit to understand the title’s significance.

It remains a matter of bald historical fact that Bud Powell was the mid-and-late 40s bebop era’s most sought-after pianist, yet he remains to this day probably the most underappreciated, given his true stature.

His direct contemporary Thelonious Monk has had his day in the sun, something to be celebrated, thanks significantly  to a composing style apart from, and more easily congenial, than the hard-core bebop that Powell excelled at. And their stories interwtine and lead to perhaps the most fateful day of Powell’s career, which also speaks to present-day concerns about police brutality against unarmed black men.

It’s unfortunate that Robin D.G. Kelly’s largely impeccable and voluminous 2009 biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, doesn’t note the cruelty and neurological damage done by a police officer on the night of January 21, 1945 to the man that Kelley calls Thelonious Monk’s best friend.  According to Duck Baker, album annotator of Bud Powell Paris Sessions (Pablo 2002), “Bud was foolish enough to interfere with some Philadelphia flatfeet who were getting rough with his best friend, Thelonious Monk.” The bludgeoning Powell suffered for his loyal courage “changed the course of his life, as Bud was led to a series of mental ‘hospitals’ where he was pumped full of pills and given shock treatments.”

Powell’s life generally spiraled downward after that, though he managed a resurgence in 1946, as evidenced by several recordings and, after being readmitted to a mental institution in 1947, by his celebrated Blue Note recordings (especially 1951’s The Amazing Bud Powell Vol. 1.) Also excellent are recordings in Europe in the late ’50s and early ’60s, including a late reunion with Dexter Gordon on the saxophonist’s superb Our Man in Paris. His career ended in “scuffling obscurity,” says jazz historian Alyn Shipton, due to his complicated mental problems and issues with drugs, and ironically to his return to New York in 1964. This was a man who, in his early 20s with the Cootie Williams Orchestra, had accompanied stage acts “so brilliantly that he outplayed the dancers he was supposed to be accompanying,” bassist Ray Brown recalls in Shipton’s book.1

Regarding the deleterious effects of shock treatment, I can attest, as it has been still used in recent years in sophisticated hospitals and clinics. I witnessed shock treatments given to my late ex-wife who suffered cognitive damage after undergoing them at the Mayo Clinic and other facilities.

Monk, for one, remained much attuned to Powell’s travails. “Bud was a genius, but you know, he was so sick, and now he’s fragile,” Monk once recalled. Another time, Monk commented, “Bud is beautiful. But he’s not doing so well in America, he’s sleeping in the gutter.” Those are both quotes from Kelly’s copious Monk biography, which amounts to a new sort of definitive history of the bebop era.

Nor have I done Powell justice over the years, having become enamored of the late recordings he did of Monk’s music for Verve Records (and his Portrait of Thelonious on Columbia), to the neglect of Powell’s earlier work. Those Monk recordings somehow managed to be marvelous but were recorded long after he had lost his prime bebop musical facility and suffered from many medical peaks and valleys. 2.

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Pianist Tim Whalen at the recording sessions for “Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell.” Courtesy timothywhalen.com

All of this underscores the importance and value of Whalen’s recording, which he will be playing from when he performs Thursday, April 6 at The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee with bassist Jeff Hamman and drummer Dave Bayles.

Comprising all Powell compositions except one by Whalen, Oblivion opens appropriately enough with “Hallucinations.” It conveys how much Bud possessed a spirit as high as his tragic bop kindred Charlie Parker. Whalen’s solo pushes hard, as if pressing to make a point about the tune’s odd juxtaposition of exuberance and sense of suffering. His heavy percussive attack recalls another bop-era pianist Eddie Costa, although he negotiates the knotty changes with aplomb.

What follows is one of Powell’s dazzling masterpieces, an impressionistic miniature comparable to Duke Ellington’s “Daybreak Express.” After a fine chordal intro, Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” glitters with an ensemble line evoking a bustling street scene, with the band sounding like a crazy chorus-line of dancing cabs in a Folies Bergere fever dream.

Whalen finds fresh inlets of light by carving out spaces and adding garlands, a sort of blending of street smarts with Francophile ornamentation. Tenor saxophonist Elijah Jamal Balbed is a modern post-Coltrane player with a rich yet grainy texture to his tone that alludes to classic tenor players and adds an offhanded gravitas to his playing. Guitarist Paul Pieper proves a swift co-conspirator in Powell’s most challenging harmonic gauntlets. Drummer Sharif Taher here has a powerful chugging style reminiscent of Tony Williams.

“Kind Bud” is a deeper, darker aspect of Powell’s bebop and for its blues lament, almost intimates a political statement about the tragic fate of such a gifted artist, especially regarding his awareness of his place in society as a black man in a white man’s world.

“Un Poco Loco” is another ironic commentary on his own afflictions and perhaps the album’s hardest swinging tune, especially on Balbed’s surging sax solo. Whalen, by contrast, allows the music to breathe a bit, while never betraying the tune’s structural integrity.

The CD’s ensuing “Blue Pearl” is a rather glimmering beauty with a slight Latin tempo. The comparatively little-known tune has a lapidarian quality, reflecting a craftsman of precise discipline that begets beauty. Here and elsewhere, bassist Eliott Seppa’s harmonizing with the piano-guitar-saxophone frontline recalls the Heath Brothers at their peak.

One would expect the title tune “Oblivion” to sound as abject as say, Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” but the band understands it as a “bouncing with Bud” blues that signifies a devil-may-care attitude. That suggests Powell’s peculiar brilliance as searingly self-possessed in the knowledge of how his black genius was betrayed. Yet he’d never let on, never let you see him pitying himself.

Bud photoBud Powell during the years he recorded with Blue Note Records. Courtesy estaticos 02.elmundo.es

Sometimes Powell’s themes and solos can be almost overwhelming, but you get a heaping helping of bop at its most modernistic and visionary and yet with a long shadow cast over it, as the CD cover’s noirish watercolor landscape superbly conveys. So perhaps even now, this music isn’t for everyone, but there’s no doubt it’s a bracing and historic statement of an art form evolving to extraordinary artistic heights.

Whalen offers his own ode to Bud, in “I’ll Keep Loving You,” a brooding ballad that feels like a stealthy suitor stealing into the beloved’s heart even if the lover’s been long gone, off in another world.

Still, Whalen and company assure that Bud Powell has returned, in hallowed honor.

Whalen is a distinctly ambitious musician who has led both a popular R&B/funk jazz ensemble and a nonet, largely of Madison-based musicians, for a number of years. Among numerous accomplishments since moving to Washington DC in 2010, he orchestrated the string arrangement for the Oscar-winning song “El Otro Lado del Rio” by Jorge Drexler from the film The Motorcycle Diaries.

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1 Alyn Shipton recounts Powell’s triumphs and tragedy in his A New History of Jazz on pages 491-495.

2. Despite Powell’s apparent loss of top-end technical facility in later years, the musical relationship between him and Monk remained crucial and vital. Some argue that Powell was Monk’s best interpreter. Seminal bebop drummer Kenny Clarke reputedly said, “Monk wrote for Bud. All his music was written for Bud, because he figured but was the only one who could play it.” https://www.amazon.com/Portrait-Thelonious-Bud-Powell/dp/B000002AHT