Tales of Dizzy: Paquito D'Rivera's jazz gig at Moscow

A few warm-ups from a clarinet rip out from behind the side curtains before he steps up on the stage at the Student Union Building ballroom on the first day of the UI Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival. His whole manner is easy-going.

On the stage he looks like a senior faculty member, beloved by students past and present. Paquito D’Rivera makes a few comments about his English skills and begins to charm the small crowd at the afternoon jazz clinic. He is a native of Cuba.

“Ask me about anything. Maybe about Romney,”he jokes.

That night he was the featured performer in the first of four jazz festival concerts. Under the “Masters & Mentors” theme, D’Rivera, winner of nine Grammy awards, will be paired with Anat Cohen, a 1996 grad of Berklee College in Boston who had been making it big in New York.

“I am afraid of her,” D’Rivera admits with a smile at his afternoon clinic.

D’Rivera and Cohan performed with the UI’s top jazz band to the delight of a packed crowd at the concert. Paquito, now 63, listened as Cohen performed her dramatic power version of “Cry Me A River” and smiled. He wore a red blazer and obvoiusly enjoyed the company of the UI’s number-one jazz band musicians and Cohen’s skills.

For a Colfax jazz fan, the night has a special appeal because one of the CHS jazz band grads, Matthew Scholz, played the piano on stage with the jazz master and Cohen as a member of UI’s band.

In the picture section of the 2005 book by Donald Maggin, D’Rivera appears as a young man. Maggin’s book is a biography of John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie, one of the jazz legends who added his music and outgoing personality to make the jazz festival what it is today.

“The first time I came here, I came with Dizzy,” D’Rivera told the evening audience. He also noted, sadly, that Gillespie died in 1993.

Maggin, who has turned out several books and produced jazz shows, includes the account of how Gillespie’s quest to discover and appreciate Latin music and rhythm led to the internatonal jazz careers of D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval and others. Those musicians have made appearances at the Moscow jazz festival over the years, including the years since Gillespie’s death.

Three years ago, the UI festival featured a special tribute to Gillespie and his part in developing what has became Afro-Cuban jazz.

One conclusion that surfaces after reading Maggin’s account is that D’Rivera, Sandoval and others might not have made it to the UI jazz show or international fame without Gillespie.

Maggin, who served in the Carter White house, tells how the President lifted restrictions on travel to Cuba in 1977 that led to a change in a jazz tour Gillespie and others had planned. The tour promoter substituted Havana for a stop in Jamacia, and Dizzy decided to take the detour.

Maggin describes how Sandoval, then 27, met the US jazz musicians dockside and offered his services. Jazz in Cuba at that time was not high on the list of Fidel Castro’s cultural plan, and the 1977 arrival of the Gillespie quartet and others was not heralded.

Sandoval, who could not speak English, offered his guide service to Gillespie who immediately asked for a trip to some place where he could hear Afro-Cuban rhythms.

Sandoval loaded Dizzy and his group in a 1951 Ford, which he had just painted with tar, and took them to a barrio to hear the Valdez brothers and their famed Los Papines quartet.

After that night’s concert, Dizzy and others the next day went with Sandoval to hear Irakere. Maggin quotes a NW Times account that the field trip produced “a jam session to end all jam sessions.” Sandoval, a trumpet player, and D’Rivera were members of the Cuban group.

Within a decade, the Cuban musicians from the afternoon jam session went on to achieve world renown and advance to the top of their profession.

After the tour, Gillespie and Stan Getz, another Jazz star who was a subject of another Maggin biography, spread the word about the Irakere band in Cuba. One of the people who listened was the president of CBS Records who traveled to Cuba, listened and signed them to make records in New York.

The Irakere album won the Grammy for the best Latin album in 1979.

D’Rivera in 1977 was already well known in Cuba. He studied at the Havana Conservatory of Music at the age of 17 and was a soloist with the Cuban National Symphony.

Maggin provided a brief accounts of how Sandoval and D’Rivera made their way out of Cuba to become international jazz performers. D’Rivera made it in 1980 by not boarding a flight in Europe and getting help in Spain. He eventually joined his parents in New Jersey where they had legally immigrated 12 years earlier.

The Gillespie influence was present at Paquito’s Wednesday night concert at Moscow. One of his numbers was “A Night in Englewood,” which was a Gillespie tribute and a takeoff on Dizzy’s jazz classic, “A Night in Tunisia.”

The Englewood title refers to Dizzy’s former home in New Jersey.

At another point in the concert with Cohen, Paquito broke into a refrain from “Salt Peanuts,” a novelty tune Gillespie wrote about 70 years ago. Paquito’s first insert of the Salt Peanuts theme was recognized by a few members of the audience. He put it in one or two more times and the crowd recognized what he was doing.

D’Rivera in his afternoon session explained to the jazz clinic audience that the term Latin music can apply to a whole spectrum of jazz styles from the Caribbean and South America.

In one of his last numbers Wednesday night, he explained he created the arrangement to prove that Johann Sebastian Bach was really Brazilian. It incorporated one of the Bach themes into a jazz beat. Paquito titled the tune “A Letter to Brenda.”