An homage to Gillespie
With "21st Century Dizzy," Perez and company reinterpret the musician.
Danilo Perez's performance Friday at the Kimmel Center's Verizon Hall marked the premiere of "Things to Come: 21st Century Dizzy," the pianist's effort to broaden the scope of mainstream jazz.
The program tailored the familiar bop repertoire of Perez's onetime mentor, Dizzy Gillespie, to a seven-piece band with a penchant for Latin, Middle Eastern, and Indian music. The treatment rendered Gillespie's compositions refreshingly unfamiliar, even unrecognizable at times.
"Salt Peanuts" opened with a flurry of cymbals, a stray arco bass lick, and some collective improvisation that trumpeter Amir ElSaffar and saxophonists Rudresh Mahanthappa and David Sanchez performed unaccompanied.
These fragments formed an odd introduction to the tune's call-and-response horn riffs, surprisingly sharp for musicians who were performing together for the first time. In its heyday, "Salt Peanuts" spotlighted horn players, but here bassist John Patitucci's mostly unaccompanied solo dazzled and also swung.
"Round Midnight" began with Perez, 44, asking the audience to sing the first chord, shtick that Gillespie, who died in 1993, would have enjoyed. The subsequent reading was straightforward, showcasing Sanchez's tenor sax and Perez's piano.
The arrangement of Gillespie's upbeat "Manteca" brought out surprising moodiness, but climaxed with a spirited duet between Sanchez and drummer Jamey Haddad, who wields an exotic arsenal of percussion instruments.
Perez's "Suite for the Americas" opened the concert and differed sharply from much of the program. Apart from the segment featuring ElSaffar's modal trumpet solo over Patitucci's bass drones, the performance sounded disjointed.
All told, the roughly 80-minute set succeeded by defying convention. The charts detoured from the familiar, and the solos avoided cliches. The group championed freedom and experimentation. And thanks to the rhythm section's omnipresent grooves, it also averted chaos.
"21st Century Dizzy" confirms that some tread remains on this repertoire, even after a half-century of heavy use. While many practice this music, relatively few tackle it onstage. The jazz world should reevaluate this stance.