Perez At The Jazz Kitchen: Original & Diverse
Review by Jay Harvey (Indianapolis Star)
Coming from the country that divides the land mass of the Western Hemisphere at its narrowest point, Danilo Perez is well-positioned to represent a sort of stylistic fulcrum in jazz.
On one side, the Panama native draws on the harmonies and off-balance melodies of the bop tradition to the North; on the other, he is steeped in the dancing, rhythmic complexity of music from the South.
Perez, who last weekend helped select the 2011 Cole Porter Fellow in Jazz as a member of the American Pianists Association jury, returned to Indianapolis on Wednesday night with his longtime trio companions, bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz.
If you're literal about the geography, it's true a lot of Perez's Latin influences come from north of Panama. The point is that though the pianist's reach has extraordinary breadth, you never get the feeling that his style is deliberately diffuse.
Rather, the whole spectrum shines through the prism of a distinctive musical personality. More important than the genres Perez embraces is that he has original things to say melodically, harmonically and rhythmically.
In the first of two sets at the Jazz Kitchen, Perez displayed his imaginative command of a broad musical palette, joined indelibly to the contributions of Cruz and Street, his sidemen for nearly a decade. There's much murky theorizing among jazz historians about the influence of African polyrhythms on jazz. In fact, different rhythmic patterns played simultaneously are rare in jazz of any era. Rhythms tend to be regimented around the need to swing or find a groove.
Enter Perez, a bandleader who swings mightily but loves setting rhythms at cross-purposes with each other. He does it consistently and joyfully, sometimes as if he were trying to throw himself off. Wednesday night, he and his mates superimposed a variety of these seemingly mismatched building blocks and made them work.
There was also, even in a modest piece like "Historia de un Amor," a tendency not to be obvious about settling into a groove. In a couple of Thelonious Monk pieces that led into a frenetic Latin-jazz finale, you sensed Perez and his mates could go on indefinitely, firmly coordinated but never settling for anything predictable.
All three musicians displayed a sensitivity to tone and phrasing that seemed all the more energized by the possibilities of the polyrhythmic arena Perez invited his musicians -- and by extension the audience -- to explore.
