Danilo Pérez | Providencia (Coming August 31st, 2010)

ACCLAIMED PANAMANIAN

MUSICIAN, EDUCATOR AND
SOCIAL ACTIVIST

DANILO
PÉREZ

RELEASES PROVIDENCIA ON
AUGUST 31,

HIS DEBUT ON MACK AVENUE
RECORDS

 

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. 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.”

 

Another influence to whom
Pérez pays tribute is Charlie Banacos, the pianist and educator who
served as a mentor to Pérez along with many others-including Michael
Brecker and Mike Stern-and passed away last December. “He was a
visionary, an educator ahead of his time,” Pérez says. “That’s why I
called that piece ‘The Oracle.'”

 

The album concludes with two brief duets between
Pérez and Mahanthappa, collectively titled “The Maze.” The two
improvisations-one muscular and jagged, the other tender and
reflective-sum up Pérez’ feelings about his music’s intent.

 

“I was checking out
different meanings of ‘maze’ and read: ‘A network of paths and edges
designed as a puzzle through which one has to find a way.’ Going through
life, when you get up in the morning you don’t know what foot you’ll be
on, left or right; you just have to be able to jump in and make
decisions on the spur of the moment.”

 

Pérez ultimately reflects on an answer to the
questions he imagines his daughters posing: “The future will be a
reflection of what we say, think and do today. Let’s use wisdom and our
art of providence as a flashlight to guide us to the restoration of
humanity.”

“Danilo is open
to whatever comes, in that zero-gravity kind of way. When we become
weightless, he doesn’t start looking for things to hold on to.” –
Wayne Shorter, 2008

“This Panamanian musician is literate in
Latin American rhythms, and so part of the wave of the recent, more
culturally specific and vastly improved Latin jazz scene. But he is
also, in a larger sense, defining post-Hancock, post-Jarrett mainstream
jazz piano, with his harmonic knowledge and his will to make a piano
trio exciting and fluid.”– Ben
Ratliff, The
New York Times, 2006

Click here and listen to an exclusive
streaming track from the album

Danilo
Pérez · Providencia

Release Date: August 31, 2010

DL Media