Grammy Award-nominee and Puerto Rico native Miguel Zenón
is bringing his quartet to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for the
24th annual Jazz Festival.
Held Friday, Jan. 30, the festival will feature a 7:30
p.m. performance by the Miguel Zenón Quartet in Michelsen Hall of the Noel Fine
Arts Center. Widely considered one of the most groundbreaking and influential
saxophonists of his generation, Zenón is also a composer who mixes Latin
American folk music and jazz.
Tickets for the concert are $18 for adults and $15 for
senior citizens and students. They are available at UW-Stevens Point
Information and Tickets Office, 715-346-4100, 800-838-3378 or http://tickets.uwsp.edu. The festival is
sponsored by the UW-Stevens Point Department of Music.
The
performance caps a day of jazz study by more than 700 students
from 27 high school and middle schools in Wisconsin, including D.C. Everest,
Merrill, Mosinee, Pacelli and Wautoma high schools. Guest teachers include 2006
UW-Stevens Point alumnus Marlin McKay and others from the Midwest.
Zenón has released nine recordings as a lead musician,
most recently “Identities are Changeable,” which bases its music on interviews
with Puerto Ricans living in New York City. It was chosen as one of the best
jazz recordings of 2014 by NBC News, National Public Radio, the Boston Globe
and Rhapsody, among others.
Zenón was chosen by the Kennedy Center to teach and
perform in West Africa through the Jazz Ambassador program and has given
lectures and master classes around the world. He also founded Caravana
Cultural, a program that offers free jazz concerts in rural Puerto Rico.
He is a faculty member at the New England Conservatory
of Music and is a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective. In 2008, he was
among 25 creative people to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, known
as the “Genius Grant.” He resides in New York City with his wife and daughter.
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