Smart and tough, the music in saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón´s Esta Plena often evokes the sounds of his neighborhood, back in Puerto Rico.
But Esta Plena is not about nostalgia -- it’s about a certain wisdom.
 “Plena is the music of the street,” says Zenón. “This is music from the people. It’s simple and basic, and accessible, it can start a party anywhere -- but at the same time, it’s so deep. That’s what I hope you can hear in this record.”
Plena is a traditional genre from Puerto Rico and in Esta Plena, Zenón reframes it with the tools and sensibilities of jazz. But this is no fusion. Rather, the music suggests a form of bilingualism. There is a lived-in understanding of the styles in play, and because of it, they sound both familiar and whole but also renewed.

This kind of work is not entirely new to Zenón. He has delved in traditional puertorican genres before, both as a sideman (most notably in David Sanchez´s Melaza, Columbia, 2000) and as leader, in Jíbaro, (Marsalis Music, 2005) in which he explored the country music of Puerto Rico.

Then, last year, Zenón won both, a Guggenheim and a no-strings-attached, “genius grant”  MacArthur Fellowship, a remarkable feat that raised some eyebrows. The prizes, he says,  did not put on any extra pressure on him as a player, composer or bandleader.  ( “ I didn’t really feel that anything changed. Of course it’s a great thing and good things that came with it, but in terms of how I think about music, nothing changed.”) But the financial rewards, did “make a lot things easier” and “take a little pressure off,” he concedes. “Now I can actually do just the gigs I want to do and the rest of the time I can stay home and write music and work in the stuff I want to work on with the people I want to work with.” In fact, the fellowships afforded Zenón the means to do the research he wanted.
Esta Plena is “definitely connected to the idea in Jíbaro in that we took something very folkloric and put it in a jazz context,” explains Zenón. “But for this record, thanks to the Guggenheim,  I went deeper in terms of research, interviewing musicians and scholars, studying old recordings, and doing a lot of reading. And also we went the next step by incorporating some of the actual instruments of this music and also [by having] vocals, which is so central to this style.”

A fusion of African, Hispanic, indigenous and Creole elements, plena emerged, by many accounts,  among the poor, working class and disenfranchised population of Ponce, a southern city of Puerto Rico, sometime between the late XIX century and early XX century.
“The most common definition is that plena is a periódico cantado (a sung newspaper),” says Hector “Tito” Matos, a plena singer and percussionist, leader of the contemporary plena group Viento de Agua. “ But it was also more than that. Plena was often the tip of the spear, so to speak, in the social struggles around the sugar cane harvest in the neighborhoods around the sugar plantations and factories.” Angel Quintero, an author and professor at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, says plena is “the music of the migrant workers who would worked in the coffee crop and then moved along the coast, from town to town,  to work in the sugar cane harvest.”

In fact, the portable instrumentation and newsy lyrics are a reminder, that plena is “an itinerant music,” he says. “ This music is related to bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican genre played with big, heavy drums, los barriles de bomba, (bomba barrels). In fact there is a bomba rhythm, called holandés (literally, Dutch),  that is the basic pattern in plena. But this had to be portable music, that’s why they cut the top of the drums and turned it into panderos (single head, hand held drums).” Also, bomba has a close relation to African slavery where one of the issues was language, given the different tribal origins of the enslaved, he explains. In such music, rhythms are more important than words. “Plena, which came later and is not connected to slavery, is more of a word music.”

And plena doesn’t have a dance associated with the rhythm, adds Matos, one of the reasons, he says, “ why plena has been left a bit behind other popular genres like salsa or merengue for example: because these genres have a definite dance patterns. Bomba has specific steps and has to do with the dialogue between the dancer and the highest pitched drum. In plena none of that exists. There are some folk dance groups that have been developing some routines, but in truth there is no historic documentation that there ever were any dance steps associated to plena, and that has worked against its popularity.”
Plena was originally played by a group featuring a guitar, a sinfonía (a small button accordion),  a pandero (a single-head, hand held drum), a guiro (scrapper), and a singer. But this evolved, explains Matos, and the instrumentation of contemporary plena now generally comprises three panderos of different sizes and with different sounds and roles.
There is a seguidor, a large, low-pitched drum, which sets the basic pattern; a requinto, smaller and high pitched,  which improvises in and around the set pattern; and a segundo, which occupies a place between the other drums in both, size and pitch and also plays a fixed pattern.

For this recording, which features 10 original tracks, half of them sung, Zenón augmented his regular quartet -- Luis Perdomo, piano; Hans Glawischnig, bass; and Henry Cole, drums – with the percussion section of a plena group -- Matos, Obanilú Allende and Juan Gutiérrez on vocals and percussion

“It’s funny because I wrote the music and space for the solos and what not, but I didn’t really feel that the saxophone was the focus of the music,” says Zenón. “It was all about the panderos– and everything was built around it. Everything came from those drums and that pattern that defines plena.  And I did it in very specific ways.”

“When I worked in Jíbaro I used the décima (a rhyming, 10 line poetic style) as a the principal concept in writing the music. In this project I did the same, but with the panderos and the number three and multiples of three regarding form, harmony, and rhythm. But all the songs started out with the plena rhythm. It wasn’t as if I wrote a melody and then I put a plena rhythm underneath it. I always started with the plena, maybe with a different tempo, or some variation with another rhythm on top to create more interest, but always based on the pandero.”

As for integrating plena to his jazz work,  Zenón argues that “having the folk roots gives the music a firm ground. It gives me a lot of freedom to try a lot of things but still have that solid base.”

The plena lyrics, sung by a singer and a chorus, in a call-and response style, can range from passing along some local news, or giving voice to a social protest, to telling a love story, expressing patriotic pride or simply celebrating plena.
A classic plena, “Cortaron a Elena,” sketches in a few lines the tale of a woman knifed; “El León,” recalls a lion escaping from the zoo, while in “Temporal y Santa Maria,” the singer worries about an approaching storm.
 For Esta Plena, Zenón was set to write instrumental songs only, but as he immersed himself in the genre, the need for lyrics became obvious. It wasn´t just the idea of being true to the notion of the periódico cantado, but also the realization that while “ jíbaro music is actually a big family of styles from different regions, plena has only one rhythm; there are no variations. So, I was trying to find different ways to use that rhythm and bring variety to the music. Adding lyrics helped me do that.”

As a result, half of the songs in Esta Plena are sung.
“ Here in Puerto Rico, perhaps for political reasons, we always have problems managing our  traditional genres, supporting them,” says Matos. “So there’s always people who object to projects like those of Miguel Zenón, or David Sánchez, or [trombonist and composer] William Cepeda or Ricky Martin [bringing traditional styles to contemporary settings or mixing the with other genres] As I see it, there’s much more to be gained than lost with those projects. Musically, it expands the genre, it brings new things to the genre. And with these projects the music gains an audience that otherwise perhaps never would have heard of plena.”

“That’s why I don’t like the term folklórico,” says Matos. “ It’s a dangerous term in that people use it to fix some music genres in time, like a museum piece that can not be touched and changed, and that kills the music. These are dynamic genres that have evolved over time, and the day we stop that evolution we’ll kill the genre.
“I´ve known Miguel a long time and we have participated in many projects together,” he says. “And since he started his group he’s been telling me about doing something with plena, but that it was not the right time yet. Getting the Guggenheim and the MacArthur gave him the opportunity he wanted. But there was a lot of thought and work beforehand.”
For Zenón, going back to plena was simply a response to “a personal desire to know more about my own culture.”
“ I left Puerto Rico to go the States (to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston) when I was 19, and then I immersed myself in jazz for a very long time,” he explains. “ I wasn’t really dealing with anything that had to do with Puerto Rican music. But when I started trying to work on my own music [I realized] that if I wanted to explore some of this music and find out my roots and who I really was, and where I was coming from, I really had to study it from the bottom up. All this started from a need to learn.”