Saxophonist Jonathan Suazo breaks new ground in Latin Jazz

On a Tuesday night in July, Jonathan Suazo’s nine-piece band crammed into a practice studio at The Record Co. in Boston. Suazo kicked off a bright melody on his alto sax. He bounced on his toes as he played, one foot set in front of the other like he was about to take off running.

Suazo cut the band off after a few moments; the drums entered late. Every little detail was important. Though the music was brash and energetic, it was also devilishly precise.

It was a sound Suazo, 35, perfected a year ago with the release of his album “Ricano.” The project, his first on Ropeadope Records, was named one of the top 10 jazz albums of 2023 by the New York Times. “Ricano” excavated new ground in the overlapping musical languages of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic — a notable feat, considering the well-trod territory of Latin jazz.

The story of “Ricano” begins with Suazo’s father. Ramon Suazo was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to Puerto Rico before his son was born. A graphic designer by trade, he also played saxophone in bands around town. “I would go to his gigs when I was small,” Suazo recalled.

Growing up in San Juan, Suazo remembers a background soundtrack of Juan Luis Guerra’s Latin pop and Stan Getz’s cool jazz. When he finally picked up the saxophone in seventh grade, his dad encouraged him with quiet gestures, like buying jazz magazines and then slipping them under his son's bedroom door. And it was his father’s death from lung cancer during Suazo’s final year at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music that cemented his commitment to his craft.

“Like, ‘I'm gonna do this for Dad’ type of thing,” Suazo said. “Full-on music. I'm taking no prisoners.”

So it was his father that Suazo looked to, again, when he had to come up with his final graduate school project at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute.

“Why do I play music? Because my dad moved from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and brought his saxophone with him,” Suazo said. “If it wasn't for the Dominican Republic, I wouldn't be a saxophonist.”

Suazo traveled to Mata los Indios, a rural region near the capital of the Dominican Republic, to explore his Afro-Dominican roots. He became enamored with Dominican traditions like Palo and Salve — music that derives its complex drumming patterns from the music of enslaved Africans.

"If it wasn't for the Dominican Republic, I wouldn't be a saxophonist."

Jonathan Suazo

He noticed many similarities with Afro-Puerto Rican music, and wanted to explore them. But he was determined to go beyond what he calls the “copy paste method” often found in Latin jazz.

“This is what Dizzy Gillespie did. This is what Tito Puente did. It’s jazz chords with Afro Latin music rhythms in the back,” Suazo said. “But after a certain point, it's like, how do you start mixing these things in, in a more organic way, in a more intentional way?”

Suazo’s idea was to deconstruct those distinctive rhythms, assigning different parts to different instruments. The piano and sax might start with a melody in one time signature, while underneath, the bass shifted from one rhythmic feel to another, reconstituting the original melody into something seemingly new.

“You’re like, ‘How did that happen, and the piano never moved?’” Suazo said. “It starts to basically define, in a musical sense, what the push and pull that makes this music so amazing is.”

His approach has impressed others in the jazz world.

“There's a lot of musicians from the Dominican Republic who have explored Afro-Dominican music within the context of improvised or creative jazz music. And there's a lot of musicians from Puerto Rico who've done the same with Afro-Puerto Rican music,” said Miguel Zenón, a Puerto Rican saxophonist and MacArthur Fellow, who is a mentor to Suazo. “But to put them both in one place and have them kind of travel together, it really hasn't been done before.”

Zenón believes the fertile ground between the two genres has gone unexplored due in part to a fraught dynamic between the two cultures, inflected by class and race.

"It takes someone like Jonathan, who really represents both sides equally, to be able to embrace it without a bias."

Miguel Zenón

“In Puerto Rico, people from the Dominican Republic are thought of as immigrants, you know? Most of them are working-class folks,” he said. “So it takes someone like Jonathan, who really represents both sides equally, to be able to embrace it without a bias.”

The music on “Ricano” is also about Suazo’s relationship with Puerto Rico — his frustration, and his grief, that he had to leave the island in order to find success.

“That is not the fault of Puerto Rico,” said Suazo, who now makes his home in Quincy. “It's our colonial status and the situation that is in Puerto Rico, [which] doesn't allow for a lot of things to flourish.”

And yet, he admitted, that underdog status helped make Puerto Rican culture what it is.

“The food, the music, the energy — you feel like you're part of something that is fighting for its own survival,” Suazo said. “And it's not going to give up.”

Neither is Suazo. Even with his newfound success, he’s still the one booking shows and sending out emails, still grinding. This summer, he released a live recording of some of the tunes on “Ricano,” and is hard at work on a sequel to the studio album: as focused as ever, the music of his father always at his back.