Saxophonist Miguel Zenon and pianist Luis Perdomo release El Arte del Bolero Vol. 3

Miguel Zenon and Luis Perdomo have released El Arte del Bolero Vol. 3, completing a hat trick of duo records that began with the volume of 2021. The Puerto Rican alto saxophonist and the Venezuelan pianist recorded it at Van Gelder Studios with Maureen Sickler engineering, and it came out on 28 August through Miel Music.

The series has been on a steep upward curve. Vol. 2 won the 2024 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, and UK Jazz News, which gave the first two volumes strong reviews, called the third magnificent in Julian Maynard-Smith's write-up.

The bolero of the title is not the Spanish dance in 3/4 time that classical composers borrowed. It is a genre of bittersweet love song that began in Cuba in the late nineteenth century and spread across Latin America and later into the United States and Spain. Every song here, as on the two earlier volumes, is a cover from that canon, what the review called the Great Latin American Songbook.

Both men grew up hearing these songs, and they have played together in the Miguel Zenon Quartet for 27 years, which shows in how little either of them crowds the other. Zenon regularly gives Perdomo room to solo alone and then drops in the smallest of interjections, a few long notes sketching the harmony or a short melodic motif, before taking the line back.

Perdomo returns the favour, notably in the space he leaves for Zenon's cadenza on the opening La Gloria Eres Tu. The record does not need its lyrics translated to land: the heartbreak of Un Amor de la Calle comes through Zenon's beseeching phrasing, and the new-love lift of De Que Callada Manera comes through Perdomo's dancelike touch. Convergencia is where the two remember they are jazz musicians first, its harmonies opening straight into bop improvisation.

El Arte del Bolero Vol. 3 files under jazz and latin, and UK Jazz News ran it the same day as its review of Gretchen Parlato's The Wise Ones. Both are logged on the release calendar.