Esta Plena

Esta Plena

Marsalis Music is pleased to announce the release of Esta Plena a new studio album by alto saxophonist<br>and composer Miguel Zenón. Last year, Zenón was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, also called the<br> genius grant. Remarkably, in 2008, he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for musical composition,<br>making Zenón the fi rst jazz musician to receive both awards in the same calendar year.<br>Esta Plena, a product of his Guggenheim Fellowship, reinterprets plena, a traditional Afro-Caribbean<br>music from Puerto Rico, with the sensibility and techniques of modern jazz. Initially, what drove these<br>projects was a personal desire to know more about my own culture, he says. After I left Puerto Rico, I<br>immersed myself in jazz for a very long time so I wasn t really dealing with Puerto Rican music. I had been<br>exposed to it growing up, but it wasn t until I began writing my own music that I really started to pay close<br>attention to it. That s when I decided to explore this music and fi nd out more about my roots. <br>Esta Plena features Zenón s long-standing quartet Luis Perdomo on acoustic piano, Hans Glawischnig<br>on bass, and Henry Cole on drums, spectacularly augmented with Héctor Tito Matos, Obanilú Allende,<br>and Juan Gutiérrez on vocals and panderos (hand-held single-head drums).