Golden City is the much-lauded Puerto Rican saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón's 16th album in just a quarter-century as a leader, and - like his last recording, 2022's Música de Las Américas - it's a carefully researched yet freewheelingly musical rumination on the cultural and political evolution of iconic locations.

Zenón's theme this time is San Francisco, a city he got to know well through his years with the San Francisco Jazz Collective. His own sax virtuosity and a powerful nonet (including pianist Matt Mitchell, guitarist Miles Okazaki and drummer Dan Weiss) keep this fast-moving cinematic venture bubbling.

Zenón's beautiful alto sound opens the set alone, before a steady three-note hook, soon swept up by entwining piano and brass lines and light-footed trombone and piano solos, arrives at an astonishing stop-time passage of fast boppish horn counterpoint and then a conga-punctuated Latin groove that make you want to jump up and cheer. ‘Rush’ opens with a processional pulse that becomes an airy ensemble dance and then a hustling finale mirroring the 1848 Gold Rush's ecstatic bedlam, and ‘Act of Exclusion’ touches on the US’ first anti-immigration legislation in 1882 (exclusion of new Chinese arrivals) as a tension between tonality and atonality, with Zenón's dazzling alto fluency, Miles Okazaki's brittle guitar lines, and Weiss's drums driving it.

‘Displacement and Erasure’ (San Francisco's later gentrification) unfolds as plaintive solos over jolting rhythms; ‘Wave of Change’ is a haunting and eventually thunderous Mingus-like march; ‘Cultural Corridor’ is a dizzying bop-like skim through a racing Puerto Rican plena rhythm.

Golden City is a startlingly imaginative set, and sometimes a breathtaking one that might well make it a standout jazz album for 2024.