Saxophonic excellence assumes myriad forms in the hands of PRISM Quartet, an acclaimed chamber ensemble with foundational ties to Philadelphia. When we last caught up with the group, it was for the world premiere of Generate Music, a visionary project that explored the intersections and tensions between Black and Jewish music.
PRISM Quartet is now preparing for another premiere, of “El Eco del Tambor (The Echo of the Drum),” which they commissioned from alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a frequent collaborator over the last decade. Zenón, a MacArthur Fellow and Doris Duke Artist as well as a Grammy winner (and a nominee again this year), has created a prolific body of work at the confluence of modern jazz and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, especially Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised.
Zenón will perform his new work with PRISM Quartet in New York City (Jan. 19) and in Philadelphia (Jan. 21), on a program that also includes two of his other pieces arranged for the group; Melissa Aldana’s suite Reflections; and pieces composed or arranged by PRISM’s resident composer and tenor saxophonist, Matthew Levy.
In advance of the concert, which WRTI featured in our Spring Arts Preview, I talked with Zenón and Levy about their mutual admiration society, collaboration across disciplines, and the specific resonances behind the new piece.
Miguel, the relationship you have with PRISM Quartet is such a great illustration of the active dialogue between jazz and classical music. Can you each recall the origins of your creative collaboration? How far back does it go?
Matthew Levy: I might start just by saying that PRISM launched a project in 2014 called Heritage/Evolution. We invited six master saxophonists/composers, primarily from the jazz world, to join us in performances of newly commissioned pieces. Miguel was one of those initial six. So we released the first of three volumes of albums called Heritage/Evolution, and we’ve gone on to commission another six or so additional composers and saxophonists as well. We fell in love with Miguel as an artist, as a composer, as a player. His sound resonates so beautifully with PRISM that we have continued to work together; he appeared on our most recent album, and now we have a new commission that he’s composed for us. So it’s been part of a long-term process of getting to know one another and building bridges between our different approaches to the instrument.
Miguel Zenón: I’ll add a little to that. I admired all the saxophonists in the quartet from afar before meeting them, both as a group and also individually, because they’re all individually amazing also. So it was great to get that call, and it was a great experience to get to write for them and make music together, like Matt mentioned. We’ve been making a lot of music since then in different instances, and it's always exciting for me to get the opportunity to connect with the guys.
Had you written for this instrumentation before — for four or five saxophones? You’ve done so many different kinds of ensemble writing, most recently with a large ensemble. But there’s something really particular about the sound of a saxophone quartet with your additional voice.
Zenón: Yeah, there is. I don’t think I had done any kind of serious writing in this format before I started writing this stuff for PRISM and the group. I played a lot of saxophone quartets, coming up as a student both in Puerto Rico and also going to college and stuff. So as a saxophonist it’s a sound that’s kind of ingrained, especially if you’re coming up through that method of teaching. And you know, PRISM is not like any other saxophone quartet out there. So for me, writing for saxophone quartet is one thing, and writing for PRISM is that thing and something else. So it was almost like that first opportunity was with the best possible vehicle there could be. It’s amazing, it really is. I remember one time, sitting at the rehearsal and just looking around. I’m like, “Man, I don’t really know who can play the saxophone that well.’ Looking at these guys and what they were doing, I was like, “Yeah, I don't really know what to do.”
Levy: I disagree.
I love that idea — and in a way, I asked the wrong question. Because I asked a question about ensemble format, and PRISM is so dynamic and expressive an ensemble that even though it is a saxophone quartet, it’s so much more than that. It’s not limited by the usual constrictions that you would associate with that.
Zenón: Right, for sure. I don't really think about it. I mean, of course, I play saxophone. There are things that I know that are going to land and feel better, or whatever. But I don’t really think about it in terms of restrictions. You know, a lot of times, especially if you’re writing for folks that you don’t really know well, you’re trying to play it a little safe, because you don’t really know the players. So you’re thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to kind of shoot down the middle, just to make sure that it’s going to be comfortable.’ Here, I don’t really have to think that way. I just kind of write what I hear, and I know it’s going to be played eventually.
Matt, I have to ask you: Miguel just paid PRISM a compliment, talking about the level of saxophone excellence. Miguel has a very special sound on alto, and it’s long been one of my favorite timbres in all of improvised music; it’s so personal and expressive. What can you say about Miguel as a saxophonist?
Levy: His sound is gorgeous. I mean, it is so beautiful. It is like nothing I’ve ever heard. And PRISM, over the course of 40 years we’ve been working on developing a group sound. It’s been a journey towards this kind of idealized place where we imagine our sounds can be more and more beautiful, and more poetic. Then Miguel just brings another level of artistry and beauty into that equation. So I first and foremost think of his sound.
But then I think of his ingenuity and lyricism, and the way he can weave melodies so effortlessly. Technique is no barrier; he plays what he hears. So there’s this consummate artistry that is really second to none. And, as I said, the group just fell in love with his playing, his artistry. He’s also a conceptualist. So he imagines beyond just individual pieces that he composes. He contextualizes music, in certain ways. And in this program we actually asked him to curate the program — like, what other music of his, and what other music within PRISM’s repertoire. would he like to have us play that would provide some context for this new commission? So that was part of the conversation as well.
Obviously the the big event with this pair of concerts is the world premiere of a new piece, “El Eco del Tambor.” Miguel, I spent some time listening to “The Missing Piece,” as a pre-existing example of what you do with this ensemble. But that’s not very rhythmically forward; it’s more about sustain and blend. So I’m really curious to hear this new piece, and what you do with a more rhythmically assertive conception for this group. Could you talk about that?
Zenón: Going back to when we first collaborated, the idea was that I was going to write a brand-new piece for the group, and myself and Tim Ries were also going to join. So it’s like a quartet plus two. That piece was called “X Marks the Square.” That piece was pretty rhythmic; it had a lot of intricacies, and it was brand-new for the group.
Then, as an add-on, I brought in two arrangements of older pieces. One of those was “The Missing Piece,” and the other one is called “Camarón,” which is on the program here as well. The idea was to have the new piece plus a couple of other things, and it’s sort of the stuff that we’ve had in the book for a while, and have played here and there. Especially “The Missing Piece” — we’ve found time to play that, because that came across. I also get a lot of feedback from other quartets. We’ve been talking for a while about this commission and trying to get it supported. Rhythm is a big thing for me; it’s something that I think about a lot. And a lot of times, you think about rhythm as something that’s really tangible and connected to certain personae within the ensemble. So if you play in an ensemble that has drums and bass or percussion, that’s their job. They keep time. They play with rhythmic structures, and they sort of delineate things to set the layer for other players that are doing other things, like setting up harmony or playing melodies, etc.
In this context, kind of similar to some of the things that I did with the Spektral Quartet, I’m trying to explore the idea of maintaining a lot of those rhythmic entities or personalities within the ensemble, without having a drummer or a bassist. We’re trying to put that into writing. So a lot of the things that I’m writing for this specific piece come from that idea. Sometimes it’s stylistically specific — like, I’m taking a rhythm that came from West Africa into the Caribbean or the Americas. And I’m kind of looking into the seed of that rhythm and trying to put that within the ensemble. For some other instances, it’s a little less specific. It might just be that I’m going to set up a groove, and that groove is going to be divided within the band to create something that’s more of a rhythmic counterpoint. So there were a couple of approaches to it. But the idea was really that I’m going to write something that’s rhythmic at its core, and it has many different definitions of what that could be. But just using the group to transmit that same drive, that same energy, that same idea of layering rhythm and layering counterpoint and using that as the basis for the whole piece.
I’d love to hear you elaborate a little bit on counterpoint as a rhythmic engine. I know it is something you did with Spektral Quartet too. But the idea of that interplay — where either of those lines by itself is not noticeably rhythmic, but the juxtaposition can create a kind of friction or energy that registers as intensely rhythmic. Can you talk about that a bit?
Zenón: Yeah, of course. When we think about counterpoint, especially in Western music, most of the time we think about melodic counterpoint as something that opens the door into some kind of harmonic material. So when we listen to Bach chorales, for example, or the Well-Tempered Clavier, we have two or three lines that, when put together, kind of set up a specific harmonic content. As opposed to when you lay down chords, all those notes are coming down at the same time. That’s a little different. That’s more vertical. For me, melodic counterpoint is more linear.
In the case of rhythmic counterpoint, the easiest way to think about it for me is to think about one rhythmic entity that can be broken down into smaller rhythmic entities. Like in the Western African tradition, you might have three or four drums, each one playing a specific part, and not deviating from that part. And all those parts, when put together, create the actual rhythmic structure. So the counterpoint comes from: what’s the relationship between all those different parts? And that’s something that you find on a drum set, for example — the way the bass drum interacts with the snare or the ride cymbal and the hi-hat, and all those things together create a groove.
So when writing music that way, not just for this ensemble but in general, I think about rhythm in layers. There’s something that could be a pulse, something that could be delineating a meter or a counterpulse, and all those things together create a relationship, and that relationship creates a groove or a rhythmic entity. I like to think about the idea of rhythmic layering as something that’s always going to inform a groove. And that’s not always the case. A lot of composers use the idea of layering as something that could create friction or tension. You know, something that’s not going to be settled. In my case, I like to use this idea as something that’s going to settle into a groove, something that you can actually feel, and sometimes even feel from a couple of different perspectives.
I really appreciate that unpacking. And with this piece in particular, you’re exploring an idea that is similar to other projects you’ve done. It’s so much about cultural transmission and diasporic movement — taking a rhythm and following its path through generations, across distances. It’s interesting how many different manifestations this core idea has had for you. It seems inexhaustible, but I wonder: how is it different for you in this particular piece?
Zenón: It feels different. There was a time when I thought about a lot of these rhythms in a very specific way — like, “this rhythm is rumba, or this rhythm is bomba, or this rhythm is plena.” Now I think about it a lot less that way, and more like: this specific cell is at the core of all these rhythms you can find in the Americas, or in Western Africa or other places. Depending on where you look, it might have a specific name — or it might have something that’s maybe a little different than the place next door, or down a little farther south or a little farther north — but at its course is coming out of the same place.
So what I’m trying to think about more and more, and what I did in many instances in this new piece, is just thinking about the cell. Thinking about simplifying the whole rhythmic structure to its simplest form, and starting from there, and building everything up from there. This piece I wrote in a kind of a particular way, because it kind of has two personalities. One personality is this thing that we’re talking about, these specific rhythmic cells that sort of build a piece. And then the other side is like a theme and variation idea, where there’s this sort of harmonic structure that gives birth to a melodic theme, and then that theme is presented, then a variation 1, variation 2, then a recap of the theme. And so the way it’s presented, the piece has seven parts, so it’s like a theme, then rhythm 1. Then variation, then rhythm 2. Then variation, then rhythm 3. Then recap. It’s kind of set up that way.
This sounds like borrowing a certain structure devised from classical form. But I also love that in the title, it’s “the echo of the drum” — and an echo is a kind of repetition, but it also mutates, right? The permutation is built into the idea.
Zenón: Yeah. And just just add a little something about the title: when I think about titles, a lot of times, I’m trying to be really specific. But in this case I was thinking about things that just come to mind when I think about this kind of music. Things are very percussive, rhythmic, and El Eco del Tambor is like a little phrase that you hear a lot with singers; a lot of times when they improvise and they refer to the drums, they’re thinking about hearing the drum. When I think about this echo of the drum, I’m thinking about the actual instance when you’re seeing something like this being performed. I had this image. Like when you get really close, you’re kind of envisioning everything; you get all the specific visuals of the drums, and the singers, and the dancers, and all those things. As you go farther and farther away, certain things disappear. But the drum is still there. If you go really far away, the last thing you’re going to hear is that drum in the distance — that echo of the drum, kind of still saying, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.” So that’s kind of what I was thinking about when I was thinking about the title.
That’s beautiful. Matt, as the group has been rehearsing and preparing for this concert, tell me what it’s like from your perspective.
Levy: Well, we’re working individually, preparing our parts. Our first rehearsal is a couple of days before the concert. So Miguel’s coming in for two days of rehearsals. And so just as I’m working through my part, I’m thinking of questions from Miguel. A lot of the rehearsal process will be modeling, and he’ll play for us. Because the sheet music is incomplete information. We kind of need to hear him playing our parts a little bit, to know how to articulate, how to phrase. So a lot of the rehearsal will be just back and forth. You know: “How would you play this, Miguel? How would you play these staccato marks, or these lines? What kind of color should we get?” So we’re learning the notes and rhythms, and bringing our best judgment to that process. But I think in the actual rehearsal is where we can understand how it all comes together, and what kind of performance practice we need to call upon in order to bring it to life.
That makes a lot of sense, too, because the source material that Miguel is invoking is so much about an oral tradition. Notation can always only ever be one degree removed from the real information, which is why rehearsal is so crucial to this process.
Levy: And it’s very collaborative. We all bring ideas, and we are very constructively criticizing one another, trying to find the truth of the piece. Having the composer be part of that is what makes it really work best of all, because we have Miguel to lead us on that journey.
PRISM Quartet with Miguel Zenón perform on Jan. 19 at Christ & St. Stephens Church in New York, and on Jan. 21 at Settlement Music School, Mary Louise Curtis Branch. For more information, visit PRISM Quartet online.
