by Nate Chinen
If this auspicious major-label exposure left any doubts about Zenón’s ambition, he quickly showed his own initiative. He formed the nucleus of a working quartet by drafting a couple of peers from the Melaza sessions: the versatile bassist Hans Glawischnig, originally from Austria, and the brilliant drummer Antonio Sánchez, hailing from Mexico. The Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo, a classmate of Glawischnig’s, completed the band.
Zenón spent a lot of time workshopping his music with these partners, so that by the time he began making albums, it was with a granite surety of purpose. The title of his fine 2002 debut, Looking Forward, articulated a direction, while the title of his even stronger 2004 follow-up, Ceremonial, implied a process and foundation. What changed in between was mostly his confidence as a composer and bandleader, and the endorsement of Branford Marsalis, who made Zenón one of the earliest signings to his Marsalis Music label. At the 2004 Newport Jazz Festival, Marsalis brought Zenón onstage for one churning tune, without a note of rehearsal. (This attention-grabbing trial by fire had the desired effect.) That same year, Zenón became a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective, joining a formidable front line that included saxophonist Joshua Redman and trumpeter Nicholas Payton.
As he grew into his career as a solo artist, Zenón organized most of his music around a thematic axis: the folkloric and cultural expressions of his homeland. Jíbaro, released in 2005, was his exploration of música jíbara, a springy style found in the mountain regions of Puerto Rico, with roots traceable to seventeenth-century Andalusia. With Esta Plena (2009), Zenón harnessed the more carnivalesque, drivingly rhythmic style of plena. And Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (2011) found him presenting a select twentieth-century survey of popular ballads and boleros, with swooning melody and chamber orchestrations. (At that point he had been featured on recent albums of similar purview by the great bassist Charlie Haden.)
Significantly, Zenón also mined the experience of Puerto Ricans in New York, a community marked by both belonging and difference. In 2012 he designed a large-ensemble, multimedia piece, Identities Are Changeable, around a series of oral histories and testimonials that he conducted himself. (He borrowed the title of the piece from a remark made by one of his interviewees, Juan Flores, a social theorist whose scholarly book The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning had partly inspired the project.) An album version of the work occasionally strained under the weight of the premise, putting words and music at odds with each other.
But there were also moments when Zenón used his interviews as building materials. A track called “Through Culture and Tradition” turned the utterance “bomba y plena” into a hooky refrain. “My Home” did something similar with the casually poignant English phrases “spend some time in Puerto Rico” and “back to my homeland.” In this sense, a self-conscious view from the outside became something like the reverse—though Zenón, true to form, was generally less interested in the sights than in the seeing.
You might say the same for any number of artists working seriously with cultural hybrids in the twenty-first century, typically along an avant-garde axis. It’s true of the Indian-American alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who used music as a portal to his own heritage—notably in 2008, on a spectacularly realized project called Kinsmen, with the traditional Carnatic saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath. The same basic intention could be ascribed to Jen Shyu, in her unclassifiable brand of performance art, which features her singing in more than a half-dozen Asian languages and playing stringed instruments like the gayageum, a twelve-stringed Korean zither. So too with the Iraqi-American trumpeter, santur player, vocalist, and composer Amir ElSaffar, in large-ensemble compositions blending state-of-the-art improvisation and the classical Iraqi maqam.
A distinct yet related version of the maqam, a system of melodic modes prevalent in the Arabic world, animates the multicultural jazz expression of Ibrahim Maalouf, a virtuoso of the four-valved, quarter-tone trumpet. Maalouf was born in Beirut but raised in Paris, where he established a successful career with his brand of expressive fusions. Some of his music has resembled global pop, with simple hooks over a strong, articulated backbeat. But he delivered a complex master class in globalized jazz practice with a transfixing hourlong suite created in tribute to Oum Kalthoum, one of the Arabic world’s canonical singers.
During the American premiere of the piece, in 2015, Maalouf played a seventy-five-minute set based almost entirely on an arrangement of “Alf Leila wa Leila,” or “One Thousand and One Nights,” Kalthoum’s best-loved performance. For much of the set, he evoked the swooping charisma of her vocal lines, worrying and finessing his notes in the service of microtonal melody. His band featured the German pianist Frank Woeste along with several marquee Americans: Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Larry Grenadier on bass, Clarence Penn on drums. They were airtight but flexible, rumbling and shuddering behind him. Often a theme was scored for trumpet and tenor in octaves, or in a chattering counterpoint. Convergence seemed to be the abiding theme.
“There are lots of common points between Arabic music and jazz music,” Maalouf said some months later, after Kalthoum had been released as an album. “Of course, improvisation is the most important one. But there is one common point that everybody skips, which is Africa. You can find African color with the blue note in jazz. The blue note is actually a quarter tone. It’s a note that you lower slightly. This heritage from Africa is a bridge between American culture and Arab culture, when, these days, most people think that those two cultures have nothing to do together, especially with all of what’s happening in terms of politics, society, and religion.”23
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The flow of cosmopolitanism in urban centers has always been integral to jazz’s evolution, and in the 2010s there was good reason to pay special attention to London. A new crop of stylish, ambitious, bridge-building young musicians was coming to prominence there, partly through the advocacy of the influential BBC radio deejay and record producer Gilles Peterson. The most striking of these was Shabaka Hutchings, a lanky, shyly magnetic tenor saxophonist and clarinetist born in London but mostly raised in Barbados. Hutchings had a creative and popular breakthrough with his imploringly earthy album Wisdom of Elders, released on Peterson’s Brownswood label in 2016. The album had been recorded in Johannesburg with a cadre of South African musicians, like the trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni and the drummer Tumi Mogorosi. This band, which Hutchings called Shabaka and the Ancestors, made its first stateside appearances at the 2017 NYC Winter Jazz Fest, and the effect was ecstatic and churning.
An associate of Hutchings, the tabla player and electronic artist Sarathy Korwar, released another notable album in roughly the same season—his debut, Day to Day (Ninja Tune). Korwar was born in the United States and raised in India before moving to England, where he connected immediately with cosmopolitan London. Partly inspired by his own field research with the Siddi of southern India, who trace their roots to the Bantu people of Africa, Korwar made Day to Day a state-of-the-art meditation on cultural migration—a rather pointed theme at a time when Europe and the United States alike were roiled by invective around Middle Eastern refugees and populist ethnonationalism.
Those very issues came into stark relief when some London musicians booked at the 2017 South by Southwest music festival, in Austin, Texas, were denied entry to the United States. Among them was the drummer Yussef Dayes, who had been expecting to appear with the fusionesque bands United Vibrations and Yussef Kamaal. (His visa, like those of his brothers, Ahmed and Kareem, core members of United Vibrations, was suddenly and summarily revoked.) Dayes’s case stirred up an international outcry, and London jazz musicians who did make it to Austin—including Hutchings, Korwar, and drummer Moses Boyd—ended their festival showcase in a show of hopeful protest, with a solidarity jam.
Boyd, an anchor of the new British jazz scene, and in some ways a shining embodiment of it, was born a
nd raised in southeast London to parents of Jamaican and Dominican stock. He grew up around a cacophony of West Indian and African music, as well as jazz, garage, dubstep, and grime. All of those elements merge in his music, with the no-nonsense flair of someone accustomed to a high standard for cultural exchange. At South by Southwest, his band Moses Boyd Exodus ended its performance with a rampaging take on its trademark tune, “Rye Lane Shuffle.” Rumbling freely on his toms, Boyd was joined by a close partner, Binker Golding, on tenor saxophone.
The groove that emerged was Nigerian Afrobeat by way of a modern jazz metropolis, one with every resource at hand. And on that level Boyd and Golding were simply working under the same presumptions they applied to their improvising duo, Binker and Moses, which won a slew of British awards in 2015 with an album called Dem Ones (Gearbox). A follow-up double album on the same label in 2017, Journey to the Mountain of Forever, featured a fantastical concept but a similar rugged cohesion, at least on the first disc, which featured the musicians in duologue. The second disc brought in some guests, including Korwar on tabla, Yussef Dayes on drums, and the free-improv lodestar Evan Parker, a hero from a previous generation, on soprano saxophone.
The strength of London’s polyglot young jazz cohort had reached undeniable critical mass by early 2018, when Hutchings joined the roster of Impulse!, which had been restarted under the corporate aegis of the Universal Music Group. Hutchings’s first move as a major-label artist was to release an album by Sons of Kemet, one of his several working bands. The baseline for Sons of Kemet is rampaging ebullience, with two drummers thrashing carnival rhythms while an apparently inexhaustible tuba player, Theon Cross, maintains a low-end churn.
Hutchings also served as the project coordinator for We Out Here, a Brownswood Records compilation conceived as a showcase for the scene. Along with Cross, whose contribution is a lively nod to his southeast London neighborhood, “Brockley,” and Boyd, whose track, “The Balance,” emulates the hypnotic glow of house music, the sampler includes tracks from the horizon-scanning bands Ezra Collective and Maisha. A persuasive young saxophonist named Nubya Garcia, who like Hutchings had been deeply influenced by a Caribbean heritage, brought presence and charisma to her track, “Once,” sounding in no particular hurry to bask in the attention that was suddenly her due.
But London wasn’t the only modern jazz city producing compelling work inspired by Diasporic legacies and cultural drift. Back in New York, the Cuban pianist David Virelles turned an interrogation of his heritage—reaching back to ancient expressions of Yoruban religious ritual—into a compelling series of projects and recordings, stretching the scope of possibility for Afro-Cuban jazz.
Virelles, like Zenón and others before him, first demonstrated an advanced fluency in the postbop tradition; by his early thirties, he was the pianist of choice for the saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Chris Potter. (As a child he’d studied classically in Cuba, where his mother was a symphonic flutist.) Among the elders in his pantheon were Steve Coleman, whom he met in Cuba, and Henry Threadgill, whom he encountered in New York.
After working in a range of settings, Virelles delivered his first great statement with a band he called Continuum, featuring the venerable avant-garde drummer Andrew Cyrille, the revered Afro-Cuban percussionist and vocalist Román Díaz, and the authoritative bassist Ben Street. The group’s self-titled debut album, released on Pi Recordings in 2012, presented a swirl of tonal color and intriguing texture, connecting with the pulse of Santería through a prism of modern jazz harmony. The amalgam felt familiar but disorienting, ritualistic but flexible. It wasn’t a crowd-pleasing effort, like “Manteca.” But it struck a deep chord; that year, Ben Ratliff and I both listed Continuum in our top-ten album lists in The New York Times.
On a follow-up album, Mbókò, released on ECM in 2014, Virelles refined his process without losing any clarity of expression. Drawing inspiration from the Abakuá, a Cuban secret society whose creolized rituals have roots in Nigeria, Virelles reenlisted Díaz on vocals and biankoméko, an array of hand drums. The album’s subtitle was “Sacred Music for Piano, Two Basses, Drum Set and Biankoméko Abakuá,” and the other musicians were bassists Robert Hurst and Thomas Morgan and drummer Marcus Gilmore.
At times the music inverted the standard foreground-and-background arrangement in a jazz ensemble: a track called “The Scribe (Tratado de Mpegó)” gave Díaz the responsibility of advancing a narrative, over a slow, processional cadence and a mysterious toll of chords. Elsewhere the ensemble embraced rhythmic abstraction of the sort you’d associate with the AACM; you could hear “Aberiñán y Aberisún” and draw a connection to an older pianist-composer like Muhal Richard Abrams. “Seven, Through the Divination Horn,” with a more focused rhythmic center and a pealing harmonic character, recalls a postbop antecedent like Andrew Hill. But what mattered in the music wasn’t the place it inhabited in the so-called jazz lineage. It was the enactment of a process—as culturally specific as the image of Oscar Valdés issuing a chant to Eleguá, but also, like any modern improvisational practice, slippery and free.
Ibrahim Maalouf, Kalthoum (Impulse!)
Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kinsmen (Pi)
Danilo Pérez, Motherland (Verve)
Various, We Out Here (Brownswood)
Miguel Zenón, Típico (Miel)
12
Style Against Style
Mary Halvorson couldn’t be seen, and it was a problem. She was settling into the first set of her momentous Village Vanguard debut, in midsummer of 2017. The engagement had been highly touted in the press, and the club was at capacity, humming with the sort of nervous, expectant energy unique to this particular proving ground. Not many female bandleaders had headlined the Vanguard over its unsurpassed reign as a New York institution. Fewer still fit the sort of astringent aesthetic profile that Halvorson had formed over the past decade, as an important new figure in the improvising avant-garde.
The band that she’d brought to the club was an octet, as on her superb recent album Away with You. And as on that album, the group’s front line comprised some of the most astute composer-improvisers in New York: the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, the saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Ingrid Laubrock, and the trombonist Jacob Garchik. They formed a phalanx across the Vanguard stage, which was one reason that Halvorson was obscured. “Where is she?” demanded Lorraine Gordon, the club’s outspoken nonagenarian owner, troubling the quiet after the first welcoming round of applause. “I can’t see her.”
Halvorson was seated, as usual, with her hollow-body Guild Artist Award guitar. The dimensions of the instrument, a big box archtop made in 1970, didn’t really allow for any other option. And because of the crowded logistics of the bandstand, she was seated behind her horn section, largely inaccessible to any sight line. From a visual standpoint, this was a form of egoless immersion bordering on awkward self-effacement. Gordon repeated her complaint.
Though she heard the remarks, Halvorson didn’t acknowledge them from the stage, forging on with the set. The issue was irresolvable, after all. And the music was formidable in both its requirements and its desired effect. On “Spirit Splitter (No. 54),” which opened the set, a featured second guitarist, the pedal steel virtuoso Susan Alcorn, framed a handsome melodic line in a cold, clear beam, while the horns bleated busy annotations. The theme evoked a chamber fanfare, shrewdly hocketed like a medieval motet. When Halvorson made her presence felt, it was with a growl of open intervals from deep within the ensemble stir: you couldn’t spot her but you heard her, and felt the unmistakable pull of her design.
Elsewhere in the set, her guitar assumed a more central role. “Away with You,” the album’s title track, began with a whirling gyre of oblong arpeggios that she traced with staccato flair. Her solo was emblematic, a fluent but wary-seeming set of elaborations that hinged on both her judicious sense of phrase and the physical tactility of her sound. She ended s
ome notes with a wobbly hiccup, and stopped others short, as if biting them off at the ends. Her flinty but resonant tone, produced with a hard attack and just a hint of digital delay, had the spiky, alien beauty of a sea urchin.
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Among other things, the improvised music tradition is predicated on an expression of personality. As a listener, you’re looking for fluency within a language; you’re looking for a spark of spontaneity and maybe truth. But what seals the deal is an instrumental voice, one that speaks with an inviolable syntax, cadence, and grain. For all the profusion of bright new talent in our time, artists fulfilling this criterion don’t come along as often as you’d think.
Halvorson announced her official arrival in 2008, with her debut as a leader, Dragon’s Head. Released on the small but stylish avant-garde label Firehouse 12, it was a head-turning trio album featuring the bassist John Hébert and the drummer Ches Smith. There were ten original compositions, spanning a range of structural oddities and off-kilter formal techniques. The lasting takeaway, though, was the decisive jolt of Halvorson’s guitar playing. In her graceful deployment of dissonance, her percussive articulation, and her relaxed but assertive cadence, she was already an original in every sense. She seemed to know not only who she was as a musician, but also precisely where she was headed.
Close observers of the experimental improv scene already had some vague familiarity with Halvorson—as one of the younger protégés of Anthony Braxton and as a DIY collaborator of smart iconoclasts like the drummer Weasel Walter and the bassist Trevor Dunn. She had been prominently featured in one of Dunn’s bands, Trio Convulsant, alongside Ches Smith. That group’s lone studio album, Sister Phantom Owl Fish, released on Ipecac in 2004, was a brash, concussive affair informed to no small degree by the doomy churn of underground metal.
