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LatinoMonk

Danilo Pérez takes on the great Thelonious

by Ed Hazell

Like so many others, Pérez has learned something from Monk about interrelating harmony, melody, and rhythm; about compositional design; about balancing the weight of a single note against the speed and density of many. He attacks his notes like a drummer, with a tone that's as hard and lustrous as polished marble. Single notes and chords fall with percussive intensity, yet his lines move with the lightness and grace of dancers.

"Bright Mississippi" displays his rhythmic acuity and lyrical resourcefulness to their fullest. His introduction quotes from Cuban son composer Ernesto Lecuona before slipping into a suave rhythmic hybrid of Cuban danzón and swing. Accenting the familiar Monk melody in surprising new ways over the Latin grooves, Pérez builds the tension in his solo to a frolicking climax. At times he pares his lines down to their bluesy essentials; at others he sets up a call-and-response between his hands to create a dynamically contrasting sense of space and line.

On track after track, it's the rhythmic ingenuity of Pérez's interpretations that impresses as much as his passion and keyboard precision. There's the knuckle-busting montuno vamp he slips into at the end of "Hot Bean Strut"; there are the nuances of the title track, which combines a rhumba clave with swing and a touch of New Orleans second-line march. He also sets "Think of One" to the standard Afro-Cuban clave in five-four time. "That will really make you think of where one is," he tells me over the phone, laughing.

A technically dazzling medley of "Evidence" played by his left hand and "Four in One" played simultaneously by his right indicates just how far Pérez can stretch rhythm and freedom. The chromatic whirlwind of "Four in One" gives the group license to play freely over the "Evidence" rhythmic pattern. "It's not totally free," he says, "but you have lots of freedom to maneuver."

In fact, rhythmic freedom is the key to his Latin jazz. In contrast to Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band, who play the Latin rhythms straight on their brilliant interpretations of Monk's music on Rhumba Para Monk (Sunnyside), Pérez and his trio are more likely to imply the two-bar clave beat than state it. "I want the rhythms to have as much input into the music as possible. We keep the clave but use the rhythms to improvise too, not just the melodies. We try to interrelate them until you're not even sure what you're listening to anymore. Is this jazz? Is this Latin? Is it . . . what? I'm trying to pass beyond the normal salsa mentality and let the rhythm section play with the rhythms, open it up more."

Pérez actually came to Monk's music fairly late in his career, when he was with singer Jon Hendricks in 1987. And he didn't start studying Monk seriously until two years ago, while on tour with Wynton Marsalis. "Playing Monk's music with those guys from New Orleans, that's when the rhythms started to sound Latin to me. For me, the most important aspect of Monk's music is the rhythmic one. The thing about Monk that kills me is even when he plays a classical device, like a whole-tone scale, it doesn't sound classical. It's because of that percussive sound he got from the instrument. And that's where I come from too. Many things in Monk's music made me think about how I play, and now I have a clearer picture of what I want to sound like. And it had a lot to do with Monk.

"There were not the same connections for me with Monk's melodies, because they are very bluesy, and we don't have the blues in Latin American music that much. There's more of a European classical influence, like Chopin and the Romantics. So when you study Monk, that's when it hits you what Afro-American music really means -- that way of putting blues melodies to rhythm displacements. Latin music has a lot of rhythms that are similar, but no blues melody. The moment you put blues with the rhythms, it starts to sound like Monk."