Miguel Zenón Quartet – Live @Parker Jazz Club, Austin TX
One night only! – September 11th 2025
Report & Photos: Thierry De Clemensat, Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
An Evening with Miguel Zenón: Heat, Harmony, and Honesty in Austin.
Austin wears its late summer like a badge of honor, relentless heat by day, heavy twilight by night, the kind of warmth that clings to your skin long after the sun has disappeared. The city hums with a constant rhythm: traffic rolling off the highway, music spilling out of bars, conversations carried on patios deep into the evening. On nights like these, you feel the double heartbeat of the city, half rock and roll, half improvisation.
The Parker Jazz Club, tucked away in the city’s downtown, feels like an oasis amid that noise. Descend the stairs and you enter a room that seems at once intimate and expansive. The low ceiling creates a cocoon, but the stage glows as though it might open onto another world. The tables are close, the lights warm, the atmosphere just smoky enough to conjure images of another era. This is not a place you stumble into; this is a place you seek out.
On that particular evening, as I made my way in from the furnace of the street, a bearded man at the door greeted me with the kind of friendliness that is pure Austin, informal, direct, genuine. I gave my name, explained I was an invited guest, and then, almost as an afterthought, turned my head to see Miguel Zenón standing just to my left.
There’s something almost disarming about moments like that. Here was a man whose music I had followed for years, whose albums carried the weight of both scholarship and spirit, standing casually near the entrance as if he were just another patron waiting for the music to begin. We exchanged words and a handshake, and immediately I felt the ease of his presence: kind, sincere, smiling without effort. He told me gently that photos outside wouldn’t be possible—he had to share a meal with his band. Then he excused himself with a nod, leaving me with the impression of someone who doesn’t need to prove anything, whose authenticity radiates in both his art and his manner.
Inside, I set my oversized camera on the table, taking up far too much real estate, as if claiming its own seat, ordered a margarita, and began fussing with the lenses and settings. We had been placed to the right of the stage, the kind of vantage point every photographer hopes for: close enough to catch every flicker of expression, yet wide enough to take in the ensemble as a whole.
At the Parker, concerts begin on time. No easing into the night. One moment the room is filled with murmurs and laughter, the next the lights shift, the curtain parts, and there they are—the quartet from Zenón’s most recent album. In that instant, I was jolted back to my earlier years, when I filmed jazz concerts for international television. The feeling was identical to the first time I found myself in the orbit of Miles Davis, Chick Corea, or Joe Zawinul: an electricity in the air, an awareness that something extraordinary was about to unfold.
Zenón opened with a few notes, soft but sure, carrying the inflection of the Caribbean into the heart of Texas. The room settled instantly. His sound has a way of commanding attention without force; it is not volume that draws you in, but intention. Soon, the other musicians entered, each voice distinct yet seamlessly interwoven. They were not merely playing; they were listening to one another with an intensity that felt almost physical.
From my vantage point, the drummer Henry Cole dominated my field of vision. I had heard him countless times on recordings but never in person. To watch him live was something else entirely. His playing was delicate, deliberate, and then suddenly explosive, a rhythmic painter who sketched and erased in real time. The comparison that came to mind was Dalí, melting and reforming clocks, reshaping time itself before our eyes. Was he a drummer who thought like a percussionist, or a percussionist who approached his art like a drummer? Neither, and both. He was simply a musician with a vision, and that vision placed him squarely among the most compelling rhythmic artists of his generation.
Zenón guided the evening like a careful architect. The first pieces unfolded in the language of world-jazz, layered with Cuban accents and rhythmic fire. Later, the music veered into the sharp lines of contemporary jazz, demanding, uncompromising, brilliant. This was not music designed for the faint-hearted or the casual listener. Yet precisely in that rigor lay its reward. There are rare moments when art, in its purest form, emerges fully and unapologetically. This was one of those moments. What Zenón and his band delivered was not entertainment in the ordinary sense; it was illumination.
He also knew when to step aside. Hans Glawischnig, the bassist with a history as the engine behind the famed NDR Bigband, delivered lines that seemed to dig straight into the earth and lift the room with them. Luis Perdomo, the pianist new to me, revealed himself as both anchor and colorist: grounding Zenón’s flights with crystalline precision while adding bursts of harmonic color like brushstrokes on a canvas. Each musician was both soloist and collaborator, their interplay a testament to trust and respect.
By the midpoint of the set, I felt myself immersed not only in the music but in the room itself. The Parker’s audience that night was not casual. They were listeners who knew, who leaned forward in their chairs, their faces lit by recognition when a phrase resolved or a rhythm broke open into something unexpected. The joy in their eyes was its own kind of music, a counterpoint to what was happening on stage.
When the final notes finally faded, there was a moment of silence before the applause—a breath in which everyone seemed to acknowledge what they had just experienced. For me, it was one of the greatest concerts I have attended, not because of spectacle or grandeur, but because of honesty. The honesty of the musicians with one another, with the audience, with themselves.
Walking back into the Austin night, the heat no longer bothered me. It felt instead like a reminder of the intensity I had just witnessed inside. Miguel Zenón is an artist who does not perform to dazzle but to reveal, who does not court attention but commands it by being true. He will appear with his quartet on September 12 and 13 at Houston’s Hobby Art Center, and for those fortunate enough to be there, it will not simply be another concert. It will be an encounter with truth, with music at its highest, most luminous level.
Photo credit: Thierry de Clemensat – 2025
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