Miguel Zenón

Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer and musician Tim Munro to write profiles of the composers featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.

Sacred Land

“The title Sacred Land is a quote from an interview with a member of the Ohlones tribe,” says Miguel Zenón. “This person said, ‘You can build all this stuff, but at the end of the day this is all sacred land.’”

Zenón watched Ohlones ceremonies online. “There was one melody that jumped out,” he says. As he was working with this melody he started to see that it was the opening of this new project, Golden City. “An opening that has us thinking about San Francisco as sacred land.”

I have to figure this out

Zenón grew up surrounded, immersed. “In Puerto Rico,” he says, “music is really present. There was always music around—people playing on the street corner, my parents playing at home.”

His first mentor was a traveling music teacher. “This gentleman would come into the neighborhood and teach the kids for free.” Zenón’s curiosity was sparked. “To discover the language of music, to explore how people communicate through these dots and stripes—I loved it.”

Jazz came into his life quite late. Zenón played classical saxophone through his years at a performing arts middle and high school. It was through friends, passing around tapes of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, that he was introduced to the world of jazz.

"I was ready by that time to fall in love with music,” Zenón says. “It changed the direction of my life.”

At first, he could not believe that these musicians were improvising. “It was like travelling two hundred years into the future. I thought, ‘They can't be making that up.’” His curiosity was sparked again,“I knew I had to figure it out.’”

With no official guidance, Zenón and his friends followed their ears. “We’d learn a blues scale. Then, if we lowered the fifth, it sounded cool. We were all going by ear and by feel.”

Graduating high school, he had to make a decision. He had planned to pursue a career in engineering. Around this time, the Berklee School of Music held a workshop in Puerto Rico. They offered scholarships for talented young musicians. Zenón received one. “That opened the door.”

Shocks were coming. The first was the weather. Zenón, who had never lived outside of Puerto Rico, arrived in Boston in the middle of a January snowstorm. “I was wearing two sets of jeans, two sets of socks, 3 sweaters.”

More shocks. He found himself in classes with students that had been playing jazz for a decade longer than he had. “They were so much more advanced. And it was the first time a teacher sat me down and said, ‘This is what jazz theory is, this is the history of this music.’”

But Zenón had a hunger. “I was practicing eight hours a day, just catching up. Once that door was open,” he says, “I just kind of ran through it. And then everything just started happening…”

9066

A piano plays a cycle of notes, angular. A bass joins with its own strange loop. There is no warmth, no sense of home. The music seems trapped in endless repeating cycles.

Zenón was shocked to learn of Executive Order 9066. In the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated by the federal government. “That this thing happened only eighty years ago,” Zenón says, “in this country, in one of its most liberal cities...”

He spoke with one person who lived through the harrowing experience as a child. “He talked about what the experience meant, not only for him, but for the community. It destroyed a whole community, which had to start from zero.”

9066 was the first piece in Golden City to be written. Zenón had absolute clarity about the tone of the music—he knew that it should not be comfortable. “I wanted it to feel cold, coming from that place of darkness.

“It was not going to be very tonal, or make a lot of sense harmonically,” he says. “I wasn’t going to think about a pretty melody or about groove. I created a system, and the system wrote the piece.”

Golden City

Zenón’s work is a mix of equal parts head and heart. From the very beginning, he looked to find this delicate balance: the intuitive tinged with the complex, the heartfelt told in a “really sophisticated musical language.”

Early on, he found a kindred spirit in the work of saxophonist/composer Steve Coleman. “His music was living proof of the intuitive and intellectual coming together—something that is groovy and at the same time challenging.”

He was also drawn to Coleman’s treatment of each musical project as if it were a research paper. “The research would be hand-in-hand with the creative process,” says Zenón. For two decades he has worked this way: identifying a subject, pursuing deep research, writing music.

In 2021, Zenón was approached by Randall Klein, the founder of SFJAZZ, the four-decade-old San Francisco-based jazz presenter. Klein had a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, and wanted to use it to commission Zenón to create a new project.

Zenón is a long and trusted SFJAZZ collaborator. He was part of the all-star SFJAZZ Collective from 2004 to 2018, where, each year, eight jazz musicians from different scenes and generations would come together to write and arrange music, then tour.

Over that time, he developed a strong relationship with San Francisco. “It became sort of my second home.” And he thought a lot about the rapid change in the city. “Change came in a way that was…unforgiving. It didn’t care who was there, it was just going to come and move them aside.”

Zenón’s curiosity was sparked. “I want to explore the history of the city, how things have changed over time,” he says. “Specifically from the perspective of minority groups, immigrant communities. After all, the city is built on their shoulders.”

He conducted some fifty interviews with people across San Francisco. There was a focus on individuals that work directly with a community or organizations that explore the history of the city. “It was a pretty intense process,” he says.

He didn’t know where the project would end up, musically. “I wanted to create this narrative of how historical events shaped the city. But how do you translate something that's not musical into musical context?”

Zenón’s process of translation is quite unique. “I’m not the kind of musician who will look at a painting and say, ‘That makes me feel really inspired, and now I’m going to write something based on those feelings.’"

Instead, he studies the painting and sees abstract forms—“maybe a combination of green, yellow, and red. Those translate into a particular kind of structure, rhythm, harmony, or melodic contour. It’s a more direct, concrete translation.”

Wave of Change

Humble drum and tambourine get the beat started. Three passionate trombone voices enter the fray, doing their own thing at first, then joining together. The protest gathers heat, gathers steam. More join, pushing forward, upward. United.

Wave of Change is an ode to community centers and organizations in San Francisco. “Instead of making their missions to stop this big ‘Tsunami of Change,’” says Zenón, “these groups instead make it a priority to be prepared to adapt and reinvent themselves, all for the sake of providing for their families and communities.”

Going deep

The structure of Golden City evolved slowly. Zenón struck on the idea of sections based on a specific theme. And for each theme, there were individual interviewees that became emblematic of that theme.

“I wanted to talk with someone in Chinatown about the Chinese experience,” he says. “I wanted to speak to someone in Japantown about how Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put into internment camps.”

But what should the musical ensemble of Golden City sound like, look like? The instrumentation, says Zenón, is not “standard issue.”

First, Zenón gathered a crew he wanted to work with. For example, his rhythm section. “We are close, musically, but also they work a lot together—they are sort of a unit already.”

Second, he wanted a band that sounded full, but didn’t have that “big band” vibe. “Something a little flexible.” Hence the three trombones. “Trombones have this sort of brassy, punchy thing without it being too bright.” Also, two of the trombonists double on other instruments. “I could expand when I needed to.”

Zenón wanted a visual component. “I wanted what people saw to correlate with what we were doing onstage.” He worked with Brian Staufenbiel, a San Francisco-based opera director. Staufenbiel helped craft the final order of the pieces. Zenón also worked with videographer David Murakami to find a visual language for the work.

Golden

After an eventful journey (through darkness and light), we clip in for one final ride. Up steep streets, around tight corners, flooring where possible, trying not to bottom out. Horns blare, people shout from the sidewalk, glimpses come of light reflecting off the water.

“The last piece in Golden City was originally to be Power of Community,” says Zenón. “That was a truly happy piece, saying, ‘After all this darkness, some light.' We have communities coming together helping each other.”

A grant from Chamber Music America allowed Zenón to revisit the project, adding an additional piece for the recording and future performances. “It was very intuitive—I was thinking about the band, thinking about melodies coming together, thinking about having something that drives, something that moves.”

Roots

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Zenón says that he had no perspective on the music of his homeland. “I was too close to this music to see it clearly. I knew the music of Puerto Rico by ear, but I didn’t know the history.”

Moving to the United States, he was laser-focused on his jazz studies. Everything else about his identity took a back seat. “I could tell you the whole history of Charlie Parker, but I couldn't talk about Puerto Rican music.”

But something changed. Living in the U.S., his perspective became much wider. And with that gain in perspective came a newfound love for the music of his homeland. “I thought, “This music is amazing. It is special.”

He began to study the music of Puerto Rico the same way he had studied jazz. “It was the bridge to my identity. This exploration of the music, the culture, the traditions of Puerto Rico helped me find myself and be at peace.”

Zenón did have models. Musicians from Puerto Rico, Panama, and Cuba who were connecting to who they were before jazz came into their lives.

That connection to home remains essential. “I’ve been living in the United States since 1996, much longer than I lived in Puerto Rico,” says Zenón. “But I consider Puerto Rico my home.”

Descriptions From the Composer

Sacred Land
Northern California was, in the not-too-distant past, home to the Ohlone people, a population that extended from the San Francisco Bay all the way to current Monterey. Ohlone descendants are still among us today, proudly carrying on their ancestor’s customs and traditions.

Rush
The California Gold Rush of 1848 was an unprecedented historical event, changing this part of the world in countless ways while simultaneously altering the way we think about migration, capitalism, ambition, and success. It transformed San Francisco from a small settlement of about 200 people into a town of 30,000 within a span of four years and in many ways accelerated the population decline of Native Californians.

Acts of Exclusion
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 essentially prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States. This federal law displays one of the many examples of what happens when ignorance, racism, and xenophobia are accepted and enforced by the highest powers. The act was finally repealed in 1943, after 70 years.

9066
In 1942, fresh from the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks during World War Two, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed and issued Executive Order 9066. This extremely controversial act authorized the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, of which nearly two-thirds were U.S. Citizens, born and raised in the United States. Although the Order was suspended in 1944, the ripple effects from this traumatic experience are still very present within the Japanese American community in the Bay Area.

Displacement and Erasure
Even though the gentrification of San Francisco might seem like a recent phenomenon, it has been happening for decades, brutally transforming neighborhoods like the Western Addition, the Mission, Chinatown, North Beach, and Bayview, among many others. Several of these communities are effectively displaced over time, only to start the process over and over again.

SRO
Single-Room Occupancy Hotels (or SROs) are a vital part of San Francisco’s housing and have been throughout the city’s history. Traditionally populated by low-wage workers and transient laborers, SROs have been especially fundamental for immigrant populations, even in present day San Francisco. As new development buildings become customary across the city, the number of SRO units has been reduced dramatically; what was once 90,000 SRO units is now closer to 20,000.

Wave of Change
Even though they might differ on their methodology and focus, most community centers and organizations in the city agree on one crucial fact: change is unstoppable and unavoidable. Instead of making their missions to stop this big “Tsunami of Change,” these groups instead make it a priority to be prepared to adapt and reinvent themselves, all for the sake of providing for their families and communities.

Sanctuary City
A term that describes cities or municipalities with active laws focused on protecting their immigrant population. These ordinances range from prohibiting local and state authorities from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding undocumented individuals to banning local authorities from detaining immigrants without violent felonies on their records. San Francisco declared itself a “Sanctuary City” in 1989, and the State of California became a “Sanctuary State” in 2017 under Bill SB 54.

Cultural Corridor
“Cultural Districts” are geographical areas within San Francisco, defined by its residents cultural and historical contributions to the city. Found all over San Francisco and including SOMA Pilipinas, Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, and Japantown (among others), these cultural corridors are supported by the city and function as virtual representatives of the best that each one of these communities has to offer.

The Power of Community
For every hurdle encountered by immigrant communities and minority groups in the city, there are individuals and organizations who make it their mission to fight for their civil and human rights. CARECEN SF, La Raza Community Center, Immigrants Rising, Acción Latina, and the New Community Leadership Foundation are among the many groups who provide support, representation, and hope for those who can’t find it elsewhere.

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