Composer, saxophonist and educator Miguel Zenon’s suite entitled “Golden City” explores the history and cultural diversity of San Francisco and the Bay Area and it’s getting its East Coast premiere as part of the Artfinity Festival at MIT, where he is a professor.
Zenon joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to speak about the project. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: I’m excited to talk about this record. “Golden City” takes on the history of the Bay Area. I’m curious what inspired this. What was your starting point?
Miguel Zenon: So I have a long relationship with an organization in San Francisco called SFJAZZ. I worked with them for about 14-15 years, mainly as part of a of an ensemble called the SFJAZZ Collective, which is sort of the house band of the organization. But I was also the musical director when the building was first inaugurated, and a bunch of other things. So they reached out to me — Randall Klein, specifically, the founder and the director of the organization — reached out to me in 2019 by commissioning a piece. They didn’t give me any direction. They said, “Do whatever you want.”
But, you know, by that point, I had visited the city for many years and it had become sort of a second home for me and my family. And I had also become really interested in the idea of how cities change over time and the reasons why they change, and also how there’s sort of like smaller groups of people — immigrant communities, minority groups that are coming from from elsewhere — sort of work in the underground of a lot of the DNA of the cities, make the cities what they are. I was interested in that as well. So I decided to take this in that direction, connecting to the history of San Francisco and its history of the Bay Area, but specifically from a perspective of immigrant groups and minority groups. And the whole experience was a really amazing learning experience for me. And the music is all inspired by that.
Rath: Tell us about it. The history, the story of the area that this work conveys.
Zenon: So my approach was actually pretty simple. I, with the help of the folks at SFJAZZ, I identified a bunch of individuals and organizations in the area who I could connect with just for interviews and sort of like interchanging ideas. So I did about 50 interviews that went from community leaders to historians to folks who had lived in the Bay Area for a very long time and were connected to a specific community, like the Japanese community there, or the Chinese or even some of the Indigenous community there. And sort of from those conversations [I] drew and created a narrative that eventually inspired the music.
Many of the things that that came to light are things that we still deal with today. You know, the idea of this foreign entity. In the case of these immigrant communities, coming from elsewhere and being welcomed first and then eventually not as welcome and seen as the enemy, and how this community has kind of found a way through the makeup of the city and eventually became integral parts of what we identify as what that city is. And this is not, of course, not unique to San Francisco. We see this in any major city like New York or Chicago or Paris or Madrid or London. But in this case, I was exploring it specifically from the perspective of San Francisco because of the connections to SFJAZZ and because the piece was going to be premiered there. And it was incredibly informative, not not just looking at the history of this part of the United States, but really digging deeper into how these communities were so integral to what the city became eventually.
Rath: It’s interesting. It’s sort of like a lot of your music, even up to this point, that reflects in the music and this mix of styles and influences and flavors.
Zenon: Yeah. Yeah, in many ways it is. A lot of the music that I write is connected to Puerto Rico or to my experience as a Puerto Rican or as a Puerto Rican living far from Puerto Rico, now been in New York for so long. In this case, there wasn’t a direct connection to that, even though for me, the experience and the research was very similar, you know, in terms of how I was approaching the information and intaking this amount of research from a nonmusical source and trying to translate it into a context that was purely musical. That was most of the work, really, just kind of gathering the information and finding a way to turn it into a context that was musical. And we could we could use sort of like a musical platform to express many of these ideas.
Rath: One track I have to ask you about because this music is also it’s about the present as much as it is about about the past. Because there’s there’s a piece in the suite called “Sanctuary City,” which is such a loaded term these days. We just saw Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called in front of Congress to talk about Boston being a “sanctuary city” and talk about what “sanctuary city” means in the context of San Francisco in this music.
Zenon: So “sanctuary city” is the term that when I started working on this project, it was a term that I had heard. But the actual meaning of the term wasn’t super clear to me until I did a little research. And then I realized that San Francisco, like many other cities in the United States, including Boston, like you mentioned, sort of declared itself a “sanctuary city,” meaning that the city has certain laws that protect immigrants [and] opens its doors to this kind of individuals who come into the city and feel protected.
When I was doing the research, the whole state of California was a sanctuary state, or was at the time. So for me, that was an interesting idea of like having to get to that point where you have to declare yourself in terms of the city as basically as an oasis for folks who are constantly unsure about what their situation is going to be the next day. And it was not just in terms of the city, but it was really powerful to me to meet so many people who their whole purpose in life is to look out for these groups, for the disenfranchised, for minority groups who live constantly on the verge of not knowing what’s going to happen the next day. And what this is, at the end of the day, is making a conscious decision to not just look for yourself and the people who are close to you, but look out for your brother and your neighbor.
So this piece in particular, “Sanctuary City” is based off a Wayne Shorter composition called “Sanctuary,” which he recorded with Miles Davis in the 60s. I took the structure of that piece, the way shorter piece, and sort of wrote my own version of the piece with a new melodic theme and a new harmonic progression, but all based on that piece “Sanctuary.” And then I titled it “Sanctuary City.”
You can see “Golden City” performed this Friday at 8 p.m. in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall at MIT as part of the Artfinity festival.
