{"id":6107,"date":"2016-09-16T20:10:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-16T20:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6107"},"modified":"2016-09-16T20:10:17","modified_gmt":"2016-09-16T20:10:17","slug":"panama-jazz-festival-gets-written-into-national-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/09\/16\/panama-jazz-festival-gets-written-into-national-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Panama Jazz Festival Gets Written Into National Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pianist<\/a>
Pianist Danilo P\u00e9rez created a jazz festival in his native Panama in 2004. Photo by Jean-Marc Aspe via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nIn 1989, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 57, declaring: \u201cJazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure, to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood, and promulgated.\u201d
\nIt was a way to pay governmental lip service to jazz as an art form; more important, it sent federal funding jazz\u2019s way.
\nOn September 5th, 2016, the Panama Jazz Festival became Law 312 of the Republic of Panama.
\nThe law guarantees funds of at least $250,000 in each year, beginning in 2018, for the festival, which is held annually in January. It\u00a0stipulates that \u201cthe government of Panama recognizes the Panama Jazz Festival is an event that creates a space for cultural exchange, that provides education and social awareness, where people of all ages, cultural and social backgrounds meet to share interdisciplinary ideas about music of the highest academic quality.\u201d
\nWord of this development came my way via email, from Patricia Zarate, a saxophonist and the wife of pianist Danilo P\u00e9rez, who founded the festival in his hometown of Panama City in 2004. According to Zarate, the support will go to the activities that benefit Panamanian citizens the most: the educational component and the outdoor free concert.
\nI covered the festival<\/a> for The Wall Street Journal in 2006.\u00a0(My complete article\u00a0is pasted below.)
\nBack then, P\u00e9rez told me, “The spirit of jazz has always been here, but it’s been sleeping for years.” And I noticed that\u00a0his festival was clearly a labor of love, with good will and sheer dedication substituting for budget at times.
\nWe like to talk about jazz as a globalizing force these days, and about the power of arts to revitalize economies. Those facts are true, and in\u00a0evidence at Perez\u2019s Panama Jazz Festival. But his festival is also a way to reinforce cultural connections that were always there, hidden histories that connect us and help us understand resonant truths and sounds that we share.
\nAs I wrote in 2006:<\/p>\n

At one University of Panama classroom, the walls were lined with pictures of American jazz icons such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington alongside those of Panamanian counterparts: Luis Russell, a pianist and bandleader who played with Armstrong; pianist Victor Boa, known as “the Art Tatum of Panama”; and flutist Mauricio Smith, to whom this year’s festival was dedicated.
\nWhile leading a clinic, pianist Randy Weston spoke about the common African roots of Panamanian and American jazz and demonstrated how African musical elements figure into his piano technique. Afterward, he headed off to research his personal legacy at the national archives: His father was born and raised not far from the Canal Zone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that the 2006 Panama Jazz Festival was also the first time I heard saxophonist Melissa Aldana, as a teenager from Chile drawn by the festival\u2019s buzz, and long before she won Thelonious Monk Institute honors and began her current career ascent.
\nIn her effusive email, Zarate spilled out thanks, and called the new law \u201ca dream come true.\u201d
\n\u201cThis could have not happened without the perfect marriage of the public\/people\/friends and their institutions,\u201d she wrote. \u201cYears of volunteer work, donations of time and money, friends who wanted to support our work in Panama and performed for less or no honorariums, the international institutions that gave millions of dollars in scholarships\/education and helped sustain our educational programs and create a new generations of musicians\u2026.\u201d She singled out the \u201chundreds of thousands of people who showed up to the concerts, breaking the myth that jazz is for adults and the elites only.\u201d
\nI’ve been to this festival twice. The next time I attend, I’d dream of creating a symposium for U.S. and Panama-based journalists and academics, to discuss what jazz means today in both countries and how it is covered and taught.
\nHere’s that 2006 piece:
\nTHE WALL STREET JOURNAL
\nA Man, a Plan, a Canal:\u00a0Panama Celebrates Jazz
\nBy LARRY BLUMENFELD
\nFebruary 15, 2006; Page D12
\nPanama City, Panama<\/em>
\nIf a single image of American music intermingling with Panamanian life prevailed in the past, it was this: The spectacle of U.S. troops blasting Van Halen and Metallica songs at deafeningly high decibels into Panama City’s Vatican Embassy in 1989, where dictator Manuel Noriega had fled prior to his capture.
\nThat now seems a distant and irrelevant memory, replaced with a glorious gathering of American and Panamanian musicians improvising upon cross-cultural themes at the third annual Panama Jazz Festival, a three-day affair in Panama City that ended Jan. 21 with a daylong free outdoor concert. The festival reaffirmed a connection between American and Panamanian musical legacies that, though enduring, is not always immediately apparent.
\nA stork walked gingerly through the lobby of the Palacio de las Garzas in Panama City’s historic Casco Viejo district on the morning of the festival’s opening. Upstairs in a drawing room, President Martin Torrijos welcomed the musicians — pianist Randy Weston and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, among other Americans, as well as Panamanians who’d made names for themselves in the U.S. but returned to live in Panama, such as saxophonist Carlos Garnett and trumpeter Victor “Vittin” Paz. Looking on, smiling broadly, were Danilo P\u00e9rez, the Panamanian-born pianist who created the festival, and Rub\u00e9n Blades, the salsa singer and film star who is now the country’s Minister of Tourism.
\n“The spirit of jazz has always been here,” said Mr. P\u00e9rez, “but it’s been sleeping for years.” Born and raised in Panama City, Mr. P\u00e9rez arrived in the U.S. in 1982, as a teenager. After studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, he gained early notice playing with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and, more recently, as a bandleader and member of saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quartet. Mr. P\u00e9rez has consistently mined his Panamanian roots through his music. His 1996 CD, “PanaMonk,” set Thelonious Monk tunes to Panamanian rhythms; 2000’s “Motherland” incorporated folk rhythms and indigenous drums. Now, at 40, Mr. P\u00e9rez acknowledges his homeland in a more practical manner — reawakening its jazz community and promoting its culture as part of a larger campaign to energize tourism and investment in Panama.
\nMr. Blades said that the number of tourists in Panama had more than doubled during the past decade, totaling more than one million visitors in the past year. He spoke wistfully about the once-vibrant Panamanian jazz scene that he experienced as a young singer. “There was a community here built around that music,” he said. “And it’s starting to come back. It’s important — not just for tourism, but for this country’s self-esteem.”
\nMr. P\u00e9rez, whose parents are educators and who is a teacher himself (at Berklee College and the New England Conservatory of Music), made education a prominent element of his festival. Through four days, Panamanian musicians studied with their American counterparts and with festival headliners. They soaked up technical training and career advice, not to mention context.
\nAt one University of Panama classroom, the walls were lined with pictures of American jazz icons such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington alongside those of Panamanian counterparts: Luis Russell, a pianist and bandleader who played with Armstrong; pianist Victor Boa, known as “the Art Tatum of Panama”; and flutist Mauricio Smith, to whom this year’s festival was dedicated.
\nWhile leading a clinic, Mr. Weston spoke about the common African roots of Panamanian and American jazz and demonstrated how African musical elements figure into his piano technique. Afterward, Mr. Weston headed off to research his personal legacy at the national archives: His father was born and raised not far from the Canal Zone.
\nOf course, a jazz festival is first and foremost about musical performances. Two nights of concerts at the cavernous Teatro Anayansi featured artists who ranged in age from an impressive eight-year-old percussionist Milagros Blades, to Mr. Weston, who is 80, and varied as widely in styles. There were several highlights: Mr. Garnett’s mixture of tender balladry and searing solos; a touching duet between flutist Mauricio Smith Jr. and his half-brother, bassist Marcelino Thompson; a demonstration of folkloric Panamanian songs and rhythms led by percussionist and anthropologist Ricaurte Villarreal; and a wonderfully hypnotic set by Mr. Weston’s trio marked by the unorthodox technique of bassist Alex Blake, who, it turns out, was born in Panama.
\nThe music spilled out into the night, through jam sessions at the Intercontinental Miramar Hotel’s Sparkle Bar, overlooking the Pacific Ocean: There, holding court among the New England Conservatory band members and local musicians were two impressive female saxophonists from Chile: Patricia Zarate, Mr. P\u00e9rez’s wife, and Melissa Aldana, a 17-year-old whose tone and confidence belied her age.
\nFor the closing-day outdoor concert, a scaffolded stage obscured all but the mother-of-pearl encrusted towers of the 18th-century cathedral in Casco Viejo’s Plaza de la Independencia, where Panama declared its sovereignty in 1903. The New England Conservatory ensemble and a quartet led by Puerto Rican American saxophonist David Sanchez drew especially warm responses from the crowd, which, by nightfall, had grown to 6,000. A “murga,” or carnival parade, worked its way through the audience, sounding much like a New Orleans second line. Mr. Weston invited Mr. Garnett to join his band for a set, their first-ever collaboration. Trumpeter Victor Paz floated sweet-toned notes over the plaza as he led a big band drawn from the University of Panama and a trio of singers that included Mr. P\u00e9rez’s father.
\nFinally, Mr. P\u00e9rez, who had forsaken performing in this year’s event to focus on administration, took the stage. Seated at a piano, he led the ensemble through “Panama Suite,” a piece he’d composed for a 2005 festival at Chicago’s Millennium Park. The music was, by turns, celebratory and brooding, full of knotty harmonies and catchy riffs, with space cleared for several extended solos. Ingeniously woven through the composition was the melody of a Panamanian folk song, often sung during festivals and celebrations of saints. At its climax, Mr. P\u00e9rez invited the crowd to sing along. “Quiero amanecer, quiero amanecer,” they repeated, meaning roughly, “I want to see the sunrise.”
\nWith the third annual Panama Jazz Festival, Mr. P\u00e9rez created a celebration worthy of staying up late — and helped usher in a new day for his native country.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1989, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 57, declaring: \u201cJazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure, to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood, and promulgated.\u201d It was a way to pay governmental lip service to jazz as an art form; … <\/p>\n

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