NPR Tiny Desk Concerts: Miguel Zenón feat. Spektral Quartet

“Saxophonist Miguel Zenón is a big thinker — that much is clear from his recorded output, with its deep and inspiring connection to the folk traditions of his native Puerto Rico. But you also get that sense from his turn behind the Tiny Desk, where we can watch the concentration on his face and those of his adventurous band, the Spektral Quartet. This is life-affirming music with curious twists and turns, expertly performed by amazingly talented musicians.

There are two ways to marvel at the stunning unison playing that comes about three-quarters of the way through "Milagrosa." First, listen with your eyes closed. The notes cascade at a such a fast clip, it can leave you breathless. Now, watch with your eyes open: It's a joy to see Zenón and his band read the notes from the page, at times sneaking in visual cues with smiles just below the surface. It must be such a pleasure to make music like this.”

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San Diego Tribune: Best jazz albums of 2018, from Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill to Myra Melford and Miguel Zenón

“On his 11th album as a solo artist, the splendid saxophonist Miguel Zenón fuses jazz, chamber-music and various idioms from his native Puerto Rico to create a sublime synthesis.”

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JazzTimes: Top 50 Albums of 2018

“All of Zenón’s varied projects have seemed propelled by a singular quest, and with this magisterial chamber music outing the alto saxophonist grabs hold of the grail as never before. Becoming in effect a fifth member of the Spektral (string) Quartet, Zenón derives from the folkloric genres of his native Puerto Rico a strikingly individual musical hybrid, fluid and poetically expressive, yet unrelenting in its technical demands.”

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Chicago Tribune: 'Best classical recordings of 2018'

”Miguel Zenon featuring Spektral Quartet: “Yo Soy La Tradicion” (Miel Music). In 2016, alto saxophonist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Zenon partnered with Chicago’s enterprising Spektral Quartet for the world premiere of his suite “Yo Soy La Tradicion” (“I Am Tradition”). Commissioned by the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the piece wove the rhythms, cadences and song structures of Zenon’s native Puerto Rico into a sprawling work that intertwined classical, jazz, blues and folkloric vocabularies. By turns complex and accessible, historic and contemporary, “Yo Soy La Tradicion” represents a major contribution from composer Zenon, in an uncommonly sensitive collaboration with the Spektrals.”

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Boston Musical Intelligencer: Not Your Usual Tradición

“A CD debut concert at First Church of Boston on November 15th found the MacArthur-certified genius and Guggenheim Fellow Miguel Zenón alongside the magnificently flexible Spektral String Quartet, playing live, the music on his 11th ground-breaking album “Yo soy la tradiciòn.”

 The group began the night with “Rosario,” ushered in by the cello’s low throaty pitch, reflective of a folksy, somewhat spiritual sounding church prelude. It is inspired by a Catholic Holy Rosary, traditionally played on folk instruments at funerals or other occasions. It is immediately interrupted with soulful, virtuosic alto saxophone lines. It beautifully juxtaposed 200-year-old classical music traditions and rule-bending modern jazz influences. Miguel Zenón and Spektral Quartet dove deep inside the musical/cultural history of Puerto Rico, but also looked towards Western music to uncover the wisdom behind the tradition. Tradition is, after all, nothing more than a “corpse of wisdom.” Miguel naturally challenges it with his exceedingly outgoing personality, extending it with his rich musical vocabulary of contemporary jazz. What is the point of a set-in-stone (musical) tradition if the wisdom behind it is not present anymore? It truly is a brave composition that connects The Catholic Church representing Holy Rosary’s musicalized order with a refreshing impressionistic texture, jagged rhythms, syncopated phrases and intense vibrancy that shines through Spektral’s musical delivery.”

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Jazziz: Miguel Zenón displays love and reverence for his musical heritage

“The saxophonist had written for string quartet before, but in preparing to work with the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet — Clara Lyon and Maeve Feinberg, violins; Doyle Armbrust, viola; Russell Rolen, cello — Zenón decided that he wanted true interaction between his alto and the quartet. “I wanted to feel [that I was] part of the ensemble,” he says. “I didn’t want this to be the kind of thing where the strings just play little [backgrounds] for me to play on top of. I also wanted to balance improvisation with what was written out.”

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Yo Soy La Tradición was actually recorded as Hurricane Maria was battering the island nation. A year and a day later, Zenón held a release concert in Chicago on September 21, as a benefit for Chicago’s Hurricane Aid for Puerto Rican Arts. “That was the quartet’s idea,” he notes. “They saw me on the phone, trying to speak to my family, watching the news while we were making the record. They said, ‘We really want to do something.’”

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Jazzwise Magazine: Miguel Zenón featuring Spektral Quartet

“This beautifully constructed chamber set takes a different tack by complimenting Zenón’s dry tone, acute intellect and inner fire with the tonal subtleties of the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet. Zenón’s cool, rhythmically aware saxophone aesthetic is based on clean lines and obtuse harmonic angles and here they soar over, rummage in and merge with strings that draw on the full width of the contemporary classical canon.”

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Latin Jazz Network: Miguel Zenón – Yo Soy la Tradición

“It takes but a few bars of “Rosario”, the first chart of Yo Soy la Tradición, by composer and alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón to realise that this music is special. By the time you get to the end of the recording – eight magnificently-sculpted works performed by Mr Zenón with the Spektral Quartet – you will be in absolutely no doubt that this is his magnum opus. There are several reasons why; not the least among them is that this work for solo alto saxophone and string quartet is one of Mr Zenón’s most impressionistic works, full of shimmering and diaphanous textures that recall not only Debussy but also an extraordinary celebration of the alto saxophone played in a classical music style. Mr Zenón’s playing is so flawlessly pure and there is a wholly natural feeling to the way he executes the climaxes and sudden changes of direction in this perfectly judged performance. Moreover the saxophonist and the Spektral Quartet parlay so subtly and seamlessly that one senses musical dialogue is taking place between old friends deeply immersed in tradition.”

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NPR "All Things Considered" – Hurricane Maria Gave Composer Miguel Zenón's 'Yo Soy La Tradición' Emotional Urgency

Heard on All Things Considered

MICHELLE MERCER

“The latest album from composer Miguel Zenón, Yo Soy la Tradición is an eight-part suite written as an homage to his native home of Puerto Rico.”

London Review of Books Blog: Not Jazz-with-Strings

“Five years ago, the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón was performing with his quartet at a club in Chicago when he was contacted by Julien Labro, a French accordionist based in Canada. Labro was in town making a record with Spektral, a Chicago-based string quartet that specialises in contemporary music. He had arranged a piece by Zenón, a racing tune called ‘El Club de la Serpiente’, for the session, and wanted to know if he would have any interest in recording it with them. Zenón went to the studio, and instantly clicked with the quartet. ‘The guys from Spektral were really on top of the music, which made the session very fun and easy,’ he told me. (‘El Club de la Serpiente’ appeared on Labro’s 2014 album From This Point Forward.) When the Hyde Park Jazz Festival commissioned Zenón to write a work for local musicians, ‘naturally I thought of Spektral.’

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Before I say anything more about this breathtaking album, let me emphasise what it is not: jazz-with-strings, the archetypal middle-brow, mid-20th-century genre in which a jazz soloist improvises over an orchestral backdrop that would otherwise be of scant musical interest. No insult intended: I rather like jazz-with-strings, especially if the soloist is Charlie Parker. But the strings in jazz-with-strings seldom did more than create a lush ambience – an aspirational signifier of class and refinement at the time, now a quaint signifier of the time and its aspirations.”

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Step Tempest: Culture, Music, Fusion, & Emotion

“"Yo Soy La Tradición" is brilliant, an entrancing, attractive, intelligent, and often stunning collection of songs that blur the lines between classical, folk, jazz, and popular music. In fact, throw out any and all labels. The insistence on labels only insults the intelligence of the audience.  Instead, focus on how beautiful - yes, beautiful - this music is.  Listen deeply, smile with it, be moved by the passions and the emotions, and enjoy how seamless the arrangements are throughout.  This is not "background music"; instead, this album will resonate for as long as you give yourself fully to the experience.  Kudos to Miguel Zenón and the Spektral Quartet!”

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The Bluegrass Situation: MUSIC WITH PURPOSE BY MAGOS HERRERA, MIGUEL ZENÓN

“Zenón’s album Yo Soy La Tradición is not as explicitly political, though he says it’s hard not to find that in the series of eight new compositions, his alto sax woven with the Spektral strings.

Zenón says that much of the mission of this album is to shed a light on the beleaguered island commonwealth of Puerto Rico – not just post-Maria, with help still slow to come, but with a mind on issues that have existed for decades, some coming from its perceived status as a “lesser” part of the U.S. But the learning process most essential to the album, he says, was his own.

“As a Puerto Rican and a Puerto Rican musician, I’m amazed by how little I know,” he says. “Always something to discover, something around the corner. And when you get into something, there’s something more after that. A lot of the ideas on the album I’ve been focused on for a while, but wanted to dig deeper for this project.””

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Chicago Classical Review: Spektral Quartet wraps Schoenberg series with metal virtuosity

"How many string quartets are there today that can make late Schoenberg seem like heavy metal?The Spektral Quartet wrapped its season-long survey of Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets Sunday afternoon at the Art Institute. It’s a testament to the ensemble’s devoted local following that Fullerton Hall was quite respectably filled for a program that didn’t exactly cater to populist tastes.
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A superb coda to the group’s ambitious and distinguished Schoenberg series. One looks forward to seeing what the Spektral Quartet will cook up for the 2018-19 season."

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Chicago Tribune: Spektral Quartet confirms Schoenberg's power in stirring concert

(photo credit: Erin Hooley for Chicago Tribune)

"The first great upheaval in modern concert life occurred more than a century ago, in Vienna, with the 1908 premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, which elicited booing, heckling and laughter.

Audiences today are much more polite, though the consequences of the score’s emancipation of dissonance still are felt in concert halls, as many listeners are yet to warm to music that Schoenberg and his disciples felt was historically necessary.

But few can warm to scores that are not being played, so the Spektral Quartet has created an important series of programs presenting all four Schoenberg quartets surrounded by some of the richest music written by others around the same time. Saturday night’s stirring concert at the University of Chicago’s Fulton Recital Hall placed the Schoenberg Second Quartet among works by Anton Webern and Bela Bartok.

There was to have been a progression from the first work Webern wrote under Schoenberg’s tutelage, the “Langsamer Satz” of 1905, to Bartok’s First Quartet, which was contemporaneous with Schoenberg’s Second (on the concert’s bottom half). But travel considerations because of snow forced some rearranging of the order of pieces, with Bartok ending the program, creating a slight letdown.

Not that the playing was anything but ardent, precise and expressive throughout. Yet many in the audience were in no mood for anything after the transcendent Schoenberg and did not return from intermission. This was an unexpected confirmation of the Schoenberg’s power. All it requires are keen and committed performers, which it got in the Spektral and soprano Kiera Duffy."

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WFMT: 10 Best Live Performances in 2017

In 2017, we – alongside our friends in Third Coast Percussion and Lincoln Trio – played live on WFMT to celebrate each group's having been nominated for a Grammy Award last year. We're pleased to share that the station has included that broadcast as one of its '10 Best Live Performances at WFMT in 2017!'

Listen to all of the Top 10 broadcasts here