Many of the most cherished standards in jazz were born as popular songs. In fact, through the course of jazz history, popular songs have served as a source of inspiration for jazz artists. They still do.
Now, in Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook, his new recording of classic Puerto Rican songs, saxophonist, composer and arranger Miguel Zenón brings that jazz tradition home – his home.
The album is comprised of ten pieces, two each by Bobby Capó, Tite Curet Alonso, Pedro Flores, Rafael Hernández, and Sylvia Rexach, who Zenónrefers to as “the George Gershwins, Cole Porters and Jerome Kerns of Puerto Rican song,” and it features his regular quartet augmented by a 10-piece wind ensemble. The music was arranged by Zenón and orchestrated by Argentine pianist, composer and arranger Guillermo Klein.
“This project grew out of my interest in exploring the history and development of The Puerto Rican song,” says Zenón. “I started little by little, researching the material and arranging some of these songs for the quartet, then eventually incorporating them into our regular repertoire. As things progressed, I started focusing on the similar characteristics between The Puerto Rican Songbook and The Great American Songbook, not only musically, but also in terms of cultural impact. From there on, the project started to take shape.”
For Alma Adentro, Zenón kept a consistent idea through the arranging process: he selected two songs by each of the composers, arranging one of the songs in “a more conservative way, staying closer to the original” and the other “with a more modern approach, taking more chances with structure and reharmonization.”
