Miguel Zenon & Laurent Coq's Rayuela

Argentine author Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch (Rayuela in Spanish) is a dizzying stream-of-consciousness work whose influences include Henry Miller, William Burroughs, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Zen Buddhism, the French New Novel and the French New Wave cinema. The novel’s 155 chapters — 99 of them deemed by the author as “expendable” — could, Cortazar said, be read either sequentially or by “hopscotching” around from chapter to chapter in a sequence that Cortazar devised that resulted in an infinite loop between the last two chapters in the sequence.

Hopscotch is Puerto Rican alto saxophonist/composer Miguel Zenón’s favorite book, not only for its radical literary method but because the text is suffused with music and, in particular, a love of jazz. “I was just drawn to the book in a literary way. I always loved it,” Zenón says. “Cortazar was a huge jazz fan. There are many references in the book to jazz and music in general. “[Cortazar] also talked about the book interacting with the reader, so the reader wouldn’t be passive. I was drawn into that as well. For me, when I read it, it was like nothing I had ever read before. I always wanted to give back to the inspiration the book gave me.”

Zenón got his chance to honor Hopscotch and its late author when he was awarded a grant from Chamber Music America, an organization that encourages interaction between American and French musicians, to compose a major work. Zenón enlisted his friend and colleague, French pianist Laurent Coq, to be his collaborator. “It was a good opportunity to do something together,” he says, “because the book takes place half in Paris and half in Buenos Aires,” reflecting the cultural relationship between Coq and Zenón. “It also was nice to experiment with other, chamber-oriented instruments.”

Zenón and Coq fashioned a 10-section suite based on the improvisatory nature of Hopscotch. They called it, appropriately, “La Rayuela.” Zenón, who was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and his quartet — pianist Coq, cellist and trombonist Dana Leong and drummer and tabla player Dan Weiss — premiered La Rayuela in Paris in April. The group, also called La Rayuela, will present the work in Hartford at the Polish National Home on Sept. 4.

Zenón and Laurent agreed to split the composition duties, with an interesting twist. Zenón composed pieces based on the novel’s Paris sections, and Coq wrote from the chapters set in Buenos Aires. “We did that on purpose,” Zenón says. “We went away from the obvious. We picked some characters, some passages, almost in a literal way, to convey Cortazar’s words into music. Laurent took his way, and I took mine.”

One of the most daring aspects of La Rayuela, one that most mimics Cortazar’s labyrinthine approach, is that the work’s sections will be played in random order in each performance. Only Zenón knows what section he will call next. “It’ll be as much a surprise to us as to the audience,” he says.

After the Hartford performance, La Rayuela will return to New York to record the work, Zenón says.

Before the La Rayuela project, Zenón had recorded an album, in 2009, titled Esta Plena, which showcased another side of his protean musical personality. Zenón was raised in San Juan, where he studied classical music and was first introduced to jazz. He also heard the indigenous Puerto Rican folk music known as plena, called “the newspaper of the people,” Zenón says.

Plena, Zenón explains, ”is very African-derived.” Its rhythmic base is supplied by three hand drums tuned like conga drums — one low-pitched, one middle-pitched, and one high-pitched. “The combination creates the rhythm of plena,” Zenón says. “It makes the music very mobile and easy to move around.”

When he first encountered plena music, Zenón didn’t automatically think of it as a jazz fusion vehicle. “I just wanted to learn more about the style. As I did research, I started getting ideas to use this rhythm and eventually it became a project. The connection with jazz became really obvious to me. Jazz and plena are really both folk music. Musically, they connect because of the African connection, but there’s a certain joyous spirit to both that’s very evident. They flowed naturally together.”

Zenón’s next project explores what he calls “the Puerto Rican songbook.” He plans to gather the historical works of Puerto Rican composers and arrange the material for his quartet and for larger ensembles. Zenón hopes to record the results of his efforts next year; in the meantime, he hopscotches with the spirit of Julio Cortazar.
- The Hartford Advocate