Miguel Zenón’s Tribute to Ornette Coleman

Miguel Zenón (right) with the other members of his quartet (from left) Demian Cabaud, Ariel Bringuez, and Jordi Rossy (photo courtesy Bringuez)

This past Friday Miel Music released its latest album of performances led by Miguel Zenón on alto saxophone. Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman is a tribute to the avant-garde saxophonist and violinist, whose 91st birthday was this past March 9. As of this writing, the album is available from Amazon.com but only as an MP3 download.

This is a live performance album, whose seven tracks were recorded on May 28, 2019 at The Bird’s Eye Jazz Club in Basel (in Switzerland). Zenón leads a quartet whose other members are Ariel Bringuez on tenor saxophone, Demian Cabaud on bass, and Jordi Rossy on drums. I have been aware of Coieman’s adventurous approaches to both composition and performance for quite some time. I was fortunate enough to listen to him give a concert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but my awareness of his work was so limited that I had a fair amount of difficulty getting my head around his playing. Serious listening only began decades later when I added Beauty is a Rare Thing, the anthology of his complete Atlantic Recordings, to my CD collection. The first two tracks of Zenón’s album, “The Tribes of New York” and “Free,” are taken from those Atlantic sessions. Whether or not “Free” foreshadows the subsequent Atlantic release of the album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation By The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet is left as an exercise for the reader!

Many of Coleman’s detractors chafed at the harsh sonorities coming out of his instrument. For the most part, those sonorities arose from his habit of blowing too hard into his instrument. Others would accuse him of lacking the intonation skills to align with the other players in his group. In that respect it would be fair to say that Zenón and the other members of his quartet have brought more polished sonorities to Coleman’s charts. Personally, I am happy with this approach. I am now far more familiar with Coleman’s own sound than I was half a century ago when I heard him perform; but, on the Law Years album, I feel better equipped to focus on the charts themselves and the improvisations that arise from them.

Every Coleman track emerges as a tightly woven interconnection of substance and style. Zenón’s session in Switzerland demonstrated that a jazz quartet could tease out the substance of Coleman’s music and recast it in their own stylistic framework. As a result, I suspect that Law Years will leave me with a clearer sense of Coleman’s thematic inventiveness, which I can enjoy either through Coleman’s own stylizations or those of Zenón and his quartet.