San Francisco Bay Blues

Golden Gate Bridge from Alcatraz. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

It wasn’t the sonorous saxophone melding into a lively piano solo that opens Miguel Zenón’s Golden City that began my most recent trip to San Francisco.  Instead, it was the mechanical female voice of a recording on the BART train telling riders what the train’s next stop was.  Although soothing, the voice on the train has nothing on that disc’s opening track, titled “Sacred Land.”  Indeed, to combine the two in the same sentence is more of a device than a comparison.