Danilo Perez

Panama 500 

(MAC 1075)

BORN in Panama City in 1966, Danilo Perez is one of jazz’s most luminous pianists, a fixture in the great Wayne Shorter’s permanent quartet and a Unesco artist for peace.

He is also a proud and scholarly Panamanian, his music ever-expressing the history and tenacity of his people, most so in his album of 2000, Motherland.

His new record is Panama 500, which remembers the five centuries of his nation’s history since 1513, when a Spanish adventurer called Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the isthmus and reached the Pacific, establishing the Americas’ first European settlement and the centuries of imperialist penetration that followed.

But there is nothing that is narrowly nationalistic about Perez’s music.

For Panama 500 he brings in bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade from Shorter’s quartet, Ben Street and Adam Cruz — bassist and percussionist from his own trio, with four Latin drummers: Cuban Roman Diaz, Brazilian Rogerio Boccato and compatriots Milagros Blades and Ricaurte Villarreal.

On violin is a colleague from the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, where Perez is artistic director, the virtuoso Alex Hargreaves.

The opening track is Rediscovery of the South Sea, with Diaz’s chants and drums forming the aboriginal undertow, Hargreaves’s melodic infusions pointing towards the Asian continent beyond the Pacific and the central theme following Balboa’s forest journey.

This narrative soundscape ends with an assertion in Duele Guna, an indigenous tongue, that the natural world is leant to humanity for love and nurture, never for profit or abuse.

Perez is at the centre of his title track, his theme the melody of a people’s dance, whereas in Reflections on the South Seas, it is as if the sea is history’s witness and history’s storyteller, its story a tide flowing through Perez’s keys.

“Abia Yala” are the Guna words for the Americas, an introductory pan flute chorus leads into Perez, Cruz and Street’s powerful portraiture of an ambivalent continent of conquest, cruelty and powerful achievement.

Perez’s notes are like a chronicler’s words, crystalline and poignant, as are those of Gratitude, the pianist’s song of thanks to all those, in family and in music, who have inspired him.

The three brief movements of The Canal Suite remind us that 2014 is the centenary of the strip of water which has caused so much dissension, possessive interference and external barbarism, while simultaneously creating within the isthmus a casserole of internationalism, as expressed in the unlikely union of Blades’s pounding drums and the simmering violin of the classically inspired Hargreaves in the second movement, Melting Pot (Chocolito).

Patitucci’s delving bass beats at the heart of The Expedition, with Blades’s rattling and scuttling snares and cymbals opening the way for the messaging notes of Perez the Panamanian griot.

Panama Viejo follows, with Perez’s phrases as sonic projections and pictures of an ancient nation’s buildings and civilisation in cruel ruins through the aggressions and destruction of pirates and invaders.

The 47 seconds of the final track is a celebratory assertion of life, peace and unity in the Duele Guna language, to the sound of indigenous pipes.

It is the summation of Perez’s music and his declaration that “I’m working every second to make examples of how music can become a tool of the commonality of humanity.”

Quite an ambition for a jazz musician, even for one like Perez who sees his music as sending a clarion call for “hope, acceptance, respect and peace” — at once the essence of all true jazz and all true music, tidings from the isthmus.