Miguel Zenon's Identities Are Changeable: Tales from the Diaspora

Building on the critical success of his 2011 recording Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook, saxophonist Miguel Zenon has enlarged his musical and theatrical boundaries with this ambitious project built around his longtime quartet (pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig, drummer Henry Cole) as the artistic core for a 12-piece big band with accompanying video. This exciting collaboration between Zenon and video artist David Dempewolf, Identitites Are Changeable is a thrilling counterpoint of music, language, and images, cross-cutting between Puerto Rico and New York, all about living contrapuntally: the split focus of Puerto Rican Americans’ cultural identity, and the basic question of who someone really is, by virtue of family, language, ritual, neighborhood, and memory. Heard at Lafayette three years ago as artistic director of SFJAZZ Collective, MacArthur Fellow Zenon excels in composition and arrangements, with sensuous and soulful mastery of the saxophone. In Identities Are Changeable, he scales new heights as cultural guide.