Things we like: Miguel Zenon

As the pandemic winds down, I remain leery of crowds. Guys I was jamming with two years ago played down the street from me; I stayed home. It's unseasonably warm and humid here -- to the point where our electrical grid, which failed during a winter storm in February, threatens to go down again, and it's not even summer yet. So I wake early to go run as soon as it's light enough to see, to keep my heart strong. By the time bands are hitting, I'm going to sleep. I'm ambivalent about King Crimson coming to my zip code next month. While it's undoubtedly my last chance to see them, I can't imagine them playing a better show than the one I saw with two dear friends in 2017. And my wife hates them. Plus...crowds.

The pandemic year was the occasion for much small-scale music-making: lots of small groups, solos and duets, mainly acoustic performances, broadcast via the internet from performers' homes or empty venues. One such project is El Arte del Bolero, which teams the Puerto Rico-born, New York-based altoist Miguel Zenon with the Venezuelan expat pianist Luis Perdomo. Horn-and-piano duets have been a jazz staple since Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. For this one, recorded live at NYC's Jazz Gallery in September of the first pandemic year, the two musicians chose a repertoire of songs from the Cuban bolero era that they absorbed from their environment as children. The tunes' lush romanticism combines with the musicians' audible affection for them as expressive vehicles to create an atmosphere of warmth and familiarity -- the perfect balm to take the edge off the news of the day.

You can hear a different side of Zenon's artistry on Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman, recorded during a 2019 residency at a club in Switzerland. (Both albums are available digitally via Zenon's Bandcamp page, as well as all the usual digital outlets.) It documents the first onstage meeting of a quartet of Spanish speakers, three of them based in Europe, playing a selection of tunes by my candidate for the greatest musician of my lifetime. The selections draw from the composer's Atlantic, Blue Note, and Columbia periods, and Zenon and his bandmates -- tenorist Ariel Bringuez, bassist Demian Cabaud, and drummer Jordi Rossy -- display a good grasp of Ornette's freewheeling melodic approach, and the loose-limbed swing of his acoustic groups. Anytime I hear Ornette's compositions played as repertory -- whether by this unit, Tim Berne's Broken Shadows, or closer to home, the tribute bassist Paul Unger helmed at the public library a few years back -- it gladdens my heart to know that the once-controversial music, now familiar as heartbeat, retains its freshness and vitality, and will in the future.