Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (Miel Music)
Miguel Zenón
Released August 30, 2019
Grammy Nominee for Best Latin Jazz Album 2020
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kncZVo87g7jR261TBt32jiuyXrwhBrNBE
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/2xgt6RLEol1akzCP2OnyzP?si=dv3ZRAPSQp-YRNZ-bePdBQ
About:
“He wasn’t just one of the guys. For me, he was beyond
that,” says Miguel Zenón about Ismael (“Maelo”) Rivera (1931-1987), the subject
of his latest project, Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera. “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 as well as 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 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, and 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 with Sonero,” 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.
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. “I grew up in salsa circles as a kid,” says Zenon, “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.
“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.”
“But, says Zenón, “Sonero to me doesn’t only mean an improviser. It exemplifies
a persona. It’s someone who embodies the genre. 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 in
their own unique style, collectively created under Zenón’s direction and 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 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 Loíza 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 stories
the lyrics tell float in the heads of the musicians, as they channel the spirit
of Ismael Rivera into their own instrumental masterwork.
Track Listing:
1. Intro/Maelo A Capella (From the Spanish Version of Tin Dom Dom – João Mello/Clodoaldo Brito /Antonio Figueroa, Peer International Corp.) 1:25 Original recording courtesy of Rafi Torres
2. Quítate de La Vía, Perico (Juan Hernández) 7:08
3. Las Tumbas (Bobby Capó, Peer International Corp.) 7:41
4. El Negro Bembón (Bobby Capó, Edward B Marks Music Company) 8:17
5. La Gata Montesa (Israel Plata, Peer International Corp.) 7:16
6. Traigo Salsa (J. Vazquez, Javier Japi Prod. and Pub.) 5:13
7. La Caras Lindas (Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso, Concord Music Group, Inc. obo Fania Music) 7:41
8. Hola (Juan Pablo Torres, Universal Musica, Inc.) 4:41
9. Colobó (H. Arroyo, Emi Longitude Music Co.) 5:59
10. Si Te Contara (Félix Reina Reyna, Ultra Empire Music obo Hall Of Fame Music Co.) 6:40
11. El Nazareno (Henry D. Williams, Emi Longitude Music Co.) 8:03
Personnel:
Miguel Zenón: alto saxofone
Luis Perdomo: piano
Hans Glawischnig: bass
Henry Cole: drums
Recorded March 19th & 20th, 2019 at The Power Station New England (Waterford, CT) by Brian Montgomery, assisted by Matthew Skowyra
Mixed by Brian Montgomery and Miguel Zenón
Mastered by Mark Wilder
Cover & Back Cover Art by Diego Romero
Graphic Design by Abdiel Flores, WIGO Design
Produced by Miguel Zenón
Review:
The alto saxophonist returns to the Puerto Rican songbook with this ingenious homage to iconic singer Ismael Rivera, whose work with Cortijo Y Su Combo and Los Cachimbos was just as envelope-pushing and formidable as Miguel Zenón’s improvisations are today. Widely known as “El Sonero Mayor,” Rivera often would sing with a wanton spirit, create dazzling rhythmic phrases. He was known to extend a song’s chorus with coruscating passages or just improvise across choruses. And his work in the 1950s helped introduce Puerto Rican rhythms—bomba and plena—to audiences across the Caribbean and Latin America.
Zenón absorbs many of Rivera’s idiosyncrasies as points of departure. The results are marvelous, especially the saxophonist’s fizzy accord with bandmates. Luis Perdomo conveys much of the elegiac drama that surged through Rivera’s songs through his evocative piano accompaniments and rhythmically agile improvisations as evidenced by the slippery makeover of “Quítate De La Via, Perico.” The quartet’s rhythmic engine—bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Henry Cole—steer the bandleader’s probing passages through unexpected corridors, maintaining logical momentum while embracing dynamic pliancy.
Still, the brightest star is Zenón. A consistently brainy improviser, he often engages in blistering lines that zigzag as if compositions were sonic schematic diagrams. That brio is certainly present on this recording, but there’s a newfound emotional warmth to his work, particularly on the sensuous “Traigo Salsa” and the transfixing “Si Te Contara.”
John Murph (DownBeat)
