DANILO PEREZ - PROVIDENCE Fatherhood changes everyone; for pianist/composer Danilo Pérez,
the birth of his two young daughters threw down a gauntlet of sorts, a
challenge to provide a better world for the girls to grow up in. “What
are you doing so we can have a healthy life in the future?” he imagined
them asking. “What are you adults leaving us?”
On a practical level, Pérez has been working busily to answer that
question both in his native Panama and his adopted home of Boston. His
annual Panama Jazz Festival has brought world-renowned musicians to the
country for the last seven years, not only to perform but also to work
closely with local youth. That mission is carried on yearlong by the
Fundación Danilo Pérez, which offers musical and cultural education to
disadvantaged young people in Panama City. He also recently co-founded
Junglewood, an artistic community in the Panamanian rain forest designed
to encourage eco-consciousness. In Boston, he now heads the Berklee
Global Jazz Institute, which offers music students an opportunity to
explore creativity, advance the social power of music, and connect music
with the restoration of ecology and humanity.
Providencia, his latest CD and debut on Mack Avenue Records, is an
attempt to provide a complementary musical answer to the same question.
“This record is based on the idea that whatever we do has an impact in
the universe,” Pérez says. “The word ‘providence,’ for me, means
standing up for the future of the next generation of children.”
That may sound like a tall order for any art form to fulfill, but
Pérez has an expansive view of music’s power and reach, expressed not
only in his goals for the album but in its diverse palette and broad
scope. Providencia crosses streams of jazz, classical and Latin American
folk music—which Pérez refers to as “hearing music in three
dimensions.”
The narrative sweep of the album’s opening track, “Daniela’s
Chronicles,” is certainly vast enough to suggest a 3D spectacle.
Beginning like a Bach invention, the piece progresses through a series
of five evocative movements, each written in honor of one year in his
eldest daughter’s life. “I made a commitment to write a piece every
year,” Pérez explains. “Hopefully it will be a symphony when she’s 17.
It’s been a challenge to keep a thread going because her personality
goes through a lot of changes on an annual basis.”
While his daughters are still too young to actually ask the type of
big questions that drive Providencia, Daniela did provide the title of
the tune “Cobilla”—a nonsense word that her father translated as a call
to arms. “I thought she meant stand up, do something, that’s my
interpretation. So it’s a protest tune; you can hear dogs barking and
sirens in the music.”
The ensemble Pérez has assembled for this album is itself an
expression of his concept of “global jazz,” an idea he carries on from
his stint with the legendary Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra.
Alongside the Panamanian leader, the group includes Indian-American
saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, Lebanese-American percussionist Jamey Haddad, Colombian conga player Ernesto Diaz, Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa and a Boston-based woodwind quintet.
At the group’s core are Pérez’ longtime trio-mates, bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz.
“It was crucial to me that we highlight the trio because there’s a
vocabulary that we’ve developed over the years,” Pérez says. “I wanted
to have an environment where we were affected by other instruments and
colors, but also completely unaffected.”
Nowhere is Pérez’ conceptual farsightedness more vividly expressed
than on the urgent, dynamic “Galactic Panama,” which Pérez explains as a
universe’s-eye-view of his homeland. Pérez’ insistent percussiveness
and Mahanthappa’s tense lines suggest the teeming population in constant
motion. Street and Cruz suggest the rhythm of the tamborito, Panama’s
national dance, without the aid of traditional instruments, which Pérez
credits to their time spent with him in Panama playing with local
musicians.
The pianist’s self-appointed role of musical ambassador for his
native country is a theme that runs throughout the album. The title of
his two-part chamber piece for woodwind quintet and the trio, “Bridge of
Life,” is a reference to Panama’s role as a land bridge between North
and South America whose emergence 3 million years ago divided the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, changing ocean currents and altering the
world’s climate, providing the environment for a new species (homo
sapiens) to develop on earth.
“A place like Panama has had such an impact on the world,” Pérez
says. “That’s the globalization we’re talking about in the record. In
musical terms, what I see in the bridge of life, I see in these three
types of music melting together: jazz, classical and Latin. I want to
keep developing those threads and make the combination really organic.”
In addition to depicting the country in his own music, Pérez has
included two pieces by Panamanian composers in his repertoire, both
tragic love stories. “We have this desire to explore the world,” he
says, “but it’s also a reality that we must deal with basic issues of
love and struggle, and these pieces really outlined that. I’ve been
trying for years to expose people to the lyrical side of Latin American
music, not only the percussion, the excitement. There’s a whole songbook
of Latin American standards to explore.” Carlos Eleta Almaran’s “Historia de un Amor” has been recorded countless
times, by everyone from Oscar Peterson to Julio Iglesias—Pérez once
heard it performed in a Japanese karaoke bar. And the lovely ballad
“Irremediablemente Solo,” rendered heartbreakingly by the trio, was
penned by pianist/organist Avelino Muñoz, who Pérez refers to as “one of
our best musicians; you can compare him to the influence Jobim had in
Brazil.”......... more BUY NOW !!!
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