Miguel Zenon Quartet at Sam First

Miguel Zenon Quartet
Sam First
Los Angeles, CA
May 29, 2026

Miguel Zenon and his compadres modus operandi was to start tunes in the middle, drive past a climax and find a new revelatory center to conclude. It's as if the tunes were soaring overhead and the band reached up to snatch them from the air midflight. Wonderous.

For folks in need of a category, I suppose you could say something silly like "avant-garde be-bop with folkloric roots." But this music is so tightly composed and performed by an ensemble that has such apparent deep commitment to a communal identity, that I posit that it is sui generis. Like a fine stew, you can identify the spices, but the thing you taste has its own flavor.

There was the rapid patter of Zenon's arpeggiated solos while Luis Perdomo's piano modulations hit like a modal freight train.  Drummer Henry Cole and Luca Alemanno on bass performed with passionate precision and fidelity to what clearly sounded like scored compositions, yet they would sometimes take off on improvisatory side routes that were so cleanly derived from what had been played before that it was difficult to be sure that what we heard wasn't on the page.

On "Navegando," (Navigating), Zenon's dancing runs over Perdomo's syncopated descending blue chords settled into a hypnotic melody that emerged like the drippings of first sweat on a humid evening.

On "Coordenadas," (Coordinates), Zenon's lead felt like a comment on the digital age, off on off on binary driven processing and Perdomo's solo was like a human response to the numbing relentless flicker, with Cole providing the punctuation accentuating the piano's frustration.

A note on the venue. Sam First is on Century Boulevard next to LAX. It is a fever dream. The joint is acoustically perfect, tiny (40 folks pack the place), furnished like a basement bar with odd comfy chairs and banquettes, and purveying top shelf drinks with home style hospitality... please keep this our little secret.