Alma Adentro

The old black and white photo of a cool dancing couple on the cover and the subtitle of this album (‘The Puerto Rican Song-book’) don’t prepare you for what’s inside. If your aural experience of this culturally complicated isle to date has been mainly salsa, merengue and soca, you might be surprised by this album’s horizontally laid-back Latin jazz, with a not very tropical lilt. Zenón plays the alto sax with feeling, warmth and vivacity and loves to improvise. The songs selected are Puerto Rican big band and bolero standards that have been playing in San José dancehalls (and soap operas) since the 1920s, with two songs each by Pedro Flores, Rafael Hernández, Bobby Capó, Tita Curet Alonso and Sylvia Rexach. But here these local (and dead) legends’ compositions are reimagined as slow, lounge-style, after¬hours jazz pieces, with Zenón backed by drums, bass and piano playing tighter than a reggaeton fan’s micro-skirt.

The clout comes not from the rhythm section – the only dance possible would be a smoochy-verging-on-illegal slowy – but from Zenón’s zingy experiments and the collective blowing of a ten-strong wind orchestra, including three French horns and three flutes. But this is considered music, reflecting on a tradition and reshaping it – slightly sultry, a bit sad and rather cerebral.