Panama's history set to music on "Panama 500"

The Boston Globe: February 3, 2014

The 47-year-old Boston jazz pianist, composer, and educator Danilo Pérez (currently at Berklee) has long explored the music of his native Panama in different settings. “Panama 500” may be his most accomplished piece yet.

Commemorating the 500th anniversary of Spanish explorer Balboa’s “discovery” of the Pacific Ocean on Panama’s west coast as well as the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal, Pérez tells the history of his country through its music, from the chants of the indigenous Guna people and folkloric dance rhythms through modern jazz.

But rather than offering a strict chronological retelling, Pérez juxtaposes and layers different musical vocabularies. Atop the ancient percussion rhythms of the introductory “Rediscovery of the South Sea,” he sets not just modern instruments (like violin and his own piano) but also pungent modern harmonies. It’s history in the present tense, experienced as a memory. Alternating his long-standing trio of bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz with his rhythm mates from the Wayne Shorter Quartet, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, Pérez adds percussion and strings. Through tuneful set pieces and improvisations, the music remains focused and evocative.

Danilo Perez celebrates the pulse of Panama

The Chicago Tribune

Twenty years ago, two relatively unknown jazz musicians made their Chicago debuts before a smallish audience in a long-forgotten North Side club called Quicksilver.

They played exceptionally well that night in April, 1994, suggesting the world would hear more about them and their boldly international perspectives on how jazz can be re-imagined.

Since then, Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez and Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sanchez have become major musical figures, each still imbuing jazz with the sounds of their homelands. Perez has played periodically in Chicago through the years, especially in large venues such as Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center and often in the company of saxophonist Wayne Shorter. But Perez hasn’t played a club date here in years, so his return to the Jazz Showcase on Thursday evening marked a significant occasion – a rare chance to hear
the eminent pianist at close range, leading his own quartet.

Not surprisingly, a large audience turned out, listeners paying close attention to Perez’s experiments in interweaving music of his native Panama and his adopted home, the United States. Perez returned the compliment by delivering scores of considerable complexity and sophistication, rightly assuming his fans were more than willing to take a journey with him into unfamiliar sounds.

Danilo Perez, world-class pianist out to change the world

The Boston Globe: April 28, 2013

The Boston GlobeThis jazz giant has faith that music can contribute to humanitarian work. Now it’s up to his Berklee College students to prove it.

Danilo Perez has just finished a clinic for young jazz players, and it’s time for his next gig. He slips out of the auditorium, crosses a narrow street, and ducks into a rehearsal room crawling with trumpeters, guitarists, singers, and more than a half-dozen percussionists. Like nearly everyone else at January’s weeklong Panama Jazz Festival, in his native Panama City, the musicians are waiting for him, a blur in a navy button-down, black pants, and thick-frame glasses. Everybody wants a piece of Danilo.

Haggard from a punishing schedule, the renowned composer, pianist, and educator is growing sicker by the day. Tomorrow, the big band he leads will close the festival before a sea of fans on a former American military base near the Panama Canal. Then he will check into a hospital, barely able to breathe. But today they must practice

The band begins rehearsing a Perez composition, Patria, or Homeland, written as a tribute to his country. The horns and drums build, but he waves them off. “The feeling is not there,” he says. He needs the ensemble to evoke, with its tones and rhythms, Spain’s colonization of Panama.

They start anew. Again, he stops the song. The music — too flat, too cold — dies. “This is important!” he says, pleading for more drama, more emotion. “You guys didn’t watch movies, man?”

The rehearsal goes on like this, with Perez standing over an electric piano, a gold cross dangling from his neck, frustration growing with each bloodless start. It’s not their musicianship he questions. He’s after something less tangible. “You know how to play correctly? That doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “That’s like when a machine washes clothes correctly.”

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