Miguel Zenón’s ‘Golden City’ Resonates Deeply at Miller Theatre

By Phillip Lutz I Nov. 26, 2024

*Golden City* mixes instrumental colors, rhythmic schemes and textural elements.
(Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima)

Art and activism have historically met through the medium of jazz. But rarely have those meetings yielded works that plumbed the depths of social despair with more emotional and intellectual complexity than Golden City, alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s disquieting disquisition on displacement in San Francisco.

While the piece would likely make an impact any time it is performed — it is, after all, 80 uncompromising minutes of unexcelled virtuosity executed without intermission — its New York premiere, held Nov. 14 at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, drew special power from the confluence of social context and musical content.

Coming only nine days after the election of a president who promises a wholesale roundup of people — the kind of action central to Zenón’s critique — the concert was held amid an atmosphere laden with feelings ranging from mild uncertainty to expectations of doom.

The mood, of course, had differed at the piece’s one other performance, in May 2022, at the venue of the co-commissioning organization, SFJAZZ; so, too, at its November 2023 recording session, which produced a document garnering a 2025 Grammy nomination for best large jazz ensemble album. A year on, the pre-performance rehearsal suggested to Zenón that his nonet’s third encounter with the score would be its most consequential.

“It feels like we’re starting to play the music,” he told the audience before the performance.

By all indications, time and changed circumstance had only heightened the intensity with which the work was delivered — and received. But its power owed as well to the contrasts Zenón had already baked into it. Throughout its 11 movements, the work liberally mixed and matched instrumental colors, rhythmic schemes and textural elements. Bolstered by vividly realized screen projections, the music featured flashes of irony tucked into stretches of carefully constructed chaos.

The piece opened with a moment of quiet foreboding via a cadenza offered by Zenón. Adopting a tone of purposeful restraint, he alluded to the pain of the displaced Ohlone people — natives of the Bay Area to whom the movement “Sacred Land” was dedicated. Like a reporter, Zenón, a shrewd observer of current events who had conducted extensive research among immigrant and native communities before writing the piece, maintained a respectful distance from his subject. The fire was to come.

It came, in fact, in fairly short order. Closing in on the cadenza’s end, Zenón settled on a repeated six-note figure. Faintly echoing Native sounds, the figure provided a central organizing point around which the band could build. And it did so rapidly, fashioning a friendly environment for a fiercely modern contrapuntal colloquy, courtesy of the three trombonists, that threatened to engulf the Native echoes.

Those echoes were never quite lost. Brassy but not overwhelmingly so, the trombonists remained sensitive to the nature of the project. Indeed, they proved the band’s most provocative element — both collectively (constituting, along with Zenón, a formidable front line) and individually (each in his own way propelling the narrative on one of the movements).

If there was a through-line in the trombonists’ solos, it was the projection of righteous rage. On “Sacred Land,” Diego Urcola worked the valves in prickly protest over the treatment of the Ohlone. On “Displacement And Erasure,” Alan Ferber’s sinewy slide registered understated fury over gentrification that had, according to Zenón’s program notes, been “brutally transforming” San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

On “Sanctuary City,” Jacob Garchik, doubling on euphonium, led listeners on a cacophonous trip deep into the harrowing world of people-hunting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The movement was the one with perhaps the most currency, considering the uproar over sanctuary cities generated by supporters of the incoming administration. Garchik’s impassioned improvisation met them head-on.

Rumbling restlessly amid the churn was the rhythm section of pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss. Longtime associates in and out of Zenón’s orbit, they functioned with near telepathic synchronicity, providing a steady undercurrent of support calibrated to help maintain the narrative. With ease, they guided soloists in and out of Zenón’s multilayered matrix of polyrhythms, providing direction as well for audience members seeking their coordinates within the matrix.

Critical guidance and added dimension also came by way of David Murakami’s visuals. In the movement “Rush,” for example, randomly crisscrossing train tracks slowly filled the screen as the music gradually increased in tempo, seemingly paralleling the Gold Rush-related population increase of San Francisco that, according to Zenón’s notes, “accelerated the population decline of Native Californians.”

Then, as the movements “Acts Of Exclusion” and “9066” unfolded, the railroad tracks morphed into crisscrossing strands of barbed wire and newspaper-style headlines appeared, heralding the legal prohibition of late-19th century immigrant workers from China and the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.

Though the period of internment was devastating, the music hardly raised its voice. Rather, it opted for a delicately rendered series of interlocking, untethered lines. Floating endlessly and without resolution, the lines seemed to mirror the disorientation of detainees as their fellow citizens cheered their fate. “Hip! Hurrah!” So blared the headlines in reaction to Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment.

Even as Zenón hinted at a more hopeful future with the buoyant “Powers Of Community” — a movement, he wrote, that had originally ended the suite with a portrayal of “communities coming together” — that bit of narrative had its dry moments of ironic dissonance. And, in between the SFJAZZ performance and the recording session, he received a Chamber Music America grant that allowed him to pick up where he had left off. The result was a kind of coda, “Golden.”

The coda had as much straightahead drive and heated trading as any movement. Musical themes from earlier in the suite reappeared, reaching back to the six-note figure introduced in “Sacred Land.” But the tone was hardly wistful. The recapitulations mutated, doubled back and mutated again. An enigmatic image of shimmering pellets populated the screen, harmonic discord filled the musical front line and the screen faded to black — all told, a bracing dose of reality on a cold New York night in November 2024. DB