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PHILADELPHIA — Paquito D’Rivera is renowned for his sax and his clarinet, marrying Cuban, Caribbean and South American music to the great U.S. invention of jazz.
His quintet — Alex Brown on piano, Oscar Stagnaro on bass, Diego Urcola on trombone and Eric Doob on drums — cooks a potent jazz stew combining everything from classic swing to contemporary salsa. In energy, technique and sheer gusto, it reflects the bandleader himself.
D’Rivera, speaking by phone from his home in northern New Jersey, charmingly calls it “a little unexpectable.” A phone call with him is like riding a tsunami.
D’Rivera laughs: “You never know what’s gonna happen. The plan is to play from our album ‘Funk Tango’ (which won the 2008 Grammy for Latin jazz album) and our new one, Jazz Class. We are going to be having fun like every time.”
Known as a “Cuban jazz musician,” he has in fact lived in the United States longer than he lived in Cuba, where he was born in 1948. Taught by his father, Tito D’Rivera, the whiz kid played in the national orchestra, even endorsing an instrument at age 11.
“Dad was a classical musician,” D’Rivera says, “and he taught me always to pay attention to sound, attack, intonation, balance, dynamics. He gave me a real good grounding, one that many jazz players don’t get. I took what my father taught me further. I am a better musician than my father was — and that was his intention!” Again, the irrepressible D’Rivera laughs.
The young D’Rivera listened to recordings of the fabled 1938 Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall, which is often credited with injecting jazz into the American mainstream. D’Rivera memorized the solos by ear. He learned clarinet and the saxophones. With Irakere, the Afro-Cuban jazz-funk-fusion outfit he cofounded, he won his first Grammy, in 1979.
Frustrated by curbs on personal and artistic freedom under Castro, however, D’Rivera defected, walking into the U.S. embassy while on tour through Spain in 1981. He went straight to the New York jazz scene, was embraced by many of the greats, including Dizzy Gillespie (“Dizzy was a crazy guy but he was always very good to me”), and, from his very first solo albums, became a great himself.
Since then, it has been one triumph after another. He is the only person to have won Grammys performing both jazz and classical music.
Why the double career? “I see no contradiction,” he says, “between swinging and playing in tune! There’s a big education gap for a lot of jazz players. Classical people are missing the spontaneity of jazz and pop music, and jazz people are missing centuries of discipline and styles and composers, a whole world of finesse. Miles (Davis), Cannonball (Adderley), Clifford Brown, they played in tune, and it never hurt them!”
He has established himself as composer as well as performer. Recently, the American Composers Orchestra premiered his “Conversations With Cachao” here and in New York. A concerto for sax, clarinet and contrabass, “Conversations” was written in memory of Israel Cachao Lopez, the legendary bassist, composer and musicologist. D’Rivera regards Cachao as a model of boundary-crossing exploration.
“Cachao was a very versatile musician,” D’Rivera says. “He used to play not only classical and jazz, but tango, mambo, everything. He had a dedication to be multidisciplinary I always loved. It’s like Duke Ellington said: There’s only two kinds of music, good music and bad music. It doesn’t matter if it’s European, Cuban, classical, jazz, as long as it’s good.”
He may be among the most honored sax players of his time, but one listen will tell you D’Rivera’s true love is clarinet. He has mastered a lyrical, precise style on what he calls “a very easy instrument to get bad sounds out of. When I play clarinet, I’m a totally different person. There are so few of us jazz clarinetists left, a small mafia. Buddy DeFranco, Eddie Daniels. The clarinet demands a lot of concentration to make it sound like music.”
D’Rivera says he hasn’t seen a drop-off of younger fans. “I think, in the last 15-20 years, we have a lot of young people coming to my concerts. It’s a very eclectic audience. And also people from different disciplines — more classical-oriented people come.”
Living in North Jersey, he still harbors frustration and hope about his birthplace: “Fifty years is too long, 50 years of the same guy (Fidel Castro), and now he appointed his brother, Raul. Well, if he’s his brother, it’s the same thing. It’s like one Bush following another. We have to stop the romance. We need Cuba to be a normal country, where the people can speak freely and look freely for their own future.”
Does he hope to see a free Cuba in his lifetime?
“Hey, you have to hope,” he says, with, yes, a laugh.
