Miguel Zenón’s Golden City (Miel Music) is an ambitious album. Its ten tracks and a postlude seek to portray “the beauty and resilience that give San Francisco its soul”.
The timing of the release is fortuitous, coming just eight days after Kamala Harris gave her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and is impossible not to make a connection. In her impactful and historic speech, not only did Harris set out her stall to be the next US President, she also told her own story, in which the key part was her San Francisco immigrant background – and she also drew attention to her jazz heritage. As this jazz-loving San Franciscan rides a seemingly ineluctable wave of popularity, the release of “Golden City” certainly feels timely.
Incidentally, there is a real connection here too: Kamala Harris was for several years a board member of SF Jazz, the main organisation which commissioned Zenón to produce the work; the Puerto Rico-born saxophonist himself was a founder member of the organisation.
To deliberately misquote Harris’s speech from last week, Zenón is a “serious man”. This album is the result of long, deep and wide-ranging research into the evolution and the struggles of wave after wave of immigrants to the Bay area, during which he conducted at least 50 interviews. Each of the tracks has an explanatory text to explain the historic context which the piece is evoking.
That approach is at the same time the album’s strength and what might hold it back. The music requires, demands proper listening. Unlike Wynton Marsalis (and particularly in a sprawling angry work like 2020’s Ever Fonky Lowdown), Zenón doesn’t do in-your-face polemic; his ways are altogether cleverer and subtler. The music uses immense craft to create a vibe, a mood, an atmosphere, and the listener is encouraged to go and find the connection. And some of the pieces are just plain difficult. “9066” for example – a reference to Franklin Roosevelt’s controversial Executive Order in 1942 which authorised the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans – is a doggedly atonal confection.
There are also powerful and urgent and more immediate and approachable statements on the album. One of these is “Wave Of Change”. It starts to gather its forces in a way reminiscent of Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, but as it builds it gives off the feeling of a protest movement which is far better organised and marshaled, and then has a final episode where it seems to reflect on how much has been achieved. Pieces can take sudden turns which take the breath away. In “SRO”, which refers to "Single-Room Occupancy Hotels" – historically important for transient labour but now almost disappeared – the music transitions from austere brass figurations to an irresistible groove which welcomes the listener in, and then evolves into a phenomenal gravity-defying Zenón solo over an asymmetric groove which just builds and builds.
The forces involved are a nonet of top jazz players, and one of the albums musical glories is Zenón’s range of writing for his three superb brass players as a unit and individually: Diego Urcola on trumpet and valve trombone, Alan Ferber on trombone and Jacob Garchik on trombone and tuba. Most of the great writers for jazz ensemble have been trombonists; Zenón has fittingly turned the tables on them.
“Golden City” is an “idealistic and energetic” album, to quote Oprah Winfrey describing Kamala Harris’s immigrant parents. It has also subtly captured an important moment.
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