“One, two, three — hit!” the bandleader shouts, and the place begins to rumble.
Horns scream, saxophones shout, drums pulse, singers cry — wave after wave of glorious sound sweeps across the room, and before long passersby start peeking in, trying to find out what on earth is going on in here.
The venue is not a glamorous nightclub or a plush concert hall but, rather, a nondescript rehearsal room where young musicians in T-shirts and jeans are riffing beneath harsh fluorescent lighting for no audience but themselves (and the recently arrived gawkers).
No one in the world has heard of these young musicians — a rehearsal band led by the legendary Panamanian trumpeter Victor “Vitin” Paz — but they could hold their own in any jazz venue on the planet.
Unfortunately, these young Panamanians are all jazzed up with nowhere to go. Having recently rediscovered their country’s deep roots in an Afro-Caribbean art form, they have embraced the music and, in some ways, have mastered it.
But their work rarely is heard outside this remote rehearsal space at the University of Panama.
“You can’t imagine the talent we have here,” says the band’s 28-year-old pianist, Carlos Campos, who himself achieves dizzying virtuosity despite a dully thudding upright instrument.
“All the kids want to play jazz; the scene is growing all the time,” Campos adds.
“But we have a lot going against us.”
Indeed, the remarkably gifted young jazz artists of Panama — which for roughly a century has been an incubator of jazz talent — find themselves in a precarious position.
They live in a country where jazz took root at the dawn of the 20th Century, just as it was blossoming in the United States, but eventually nearly vanished.
While America’s jazz legends were celebrated around the world, Panama’s were not even recorded until the late 1950s and early ’60s, and most of its best artists left the country to pursue careers in the U.S., Europe and beyond.
So a culture that once played a starring role in the origins of the music practically lost touch with its own, distinctly lyrical brand of jazz.
In recent years, however, Panamanian-born giants such as Paz, salsa singer Ruben Blades, saxophonist Carlos Garnett, pianist Danilo Perez and others began coming home to try to reawaken the art form in a country that’s cash poor (at least by North American standards) yet talent rich. By organizing concerts, teaching master classes and otherwise promoting the music to young artists, the Panamanian masters have succeeded surprisingly well in re-igniting homegrown jazz.
The proof is plain to hear in the plush orchestral sound of Paz’s rehearsal band, in the pianistic feats of Campos and in performances across Panama City. From the high-flying virtuosity of guitarist Luis Bonilla during an outdoor concert in the Old City to the prodigious technique of 8-year-old percussionist Milagros Blades (no relation to Ruben Blades) in the Teatro Anayansi to the hard-hitting ensemble work of the youthful Panama Jazz Project in various venues, this city has started to swing again.
Spreading fast
“Jazz is growing so fast in Panama,” says Billy Herron, a 26-year-old Panamanian jazz guitarist and aspiring record producer, between sets at the popular Take Five jazz club, in the Old City.
“Anywhere you go, you hear kids practicing trumpet lines from Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and things like that.”
Adds Carlos “Chale” Icaza, a jazz drummer and composer who two months ago moved back home to Panama from New York to get in on the action, “There is a rediscovery happening here. People are finding a pride in their country, and they’re finding it in our music.”
The confluence of seasoned musicians coming back to Panama and young talents learning from the elders suggests that Panama could rise again as a jazz power — if anybody outside Panama bothered to listen.
If the world tuned in to the sounds rising up across this country, listeners would applaud artists who convey a melodic ardor and a folkloric charm that proves Havana isn’t the only musical powerhouse south of the border.
“We can play, but because we don’t have a record industry here, who can hear us?” asks Campos, whose digital prowess and expressive power would keep him employed seven nights a week if he were in the United States.
“In Panama, the talented people don’t have a chance.”
That long has been the case in a country that for centuries found itself under the sway of the Spanish, the French and, most recently, the United States, which started building the Panama Canal in 1904 and didn’t relinquish control of it until the last day of 1999. Never as affluent as the outside powers that ran the country, Panamanians found their culture relegated to second-class status in their own land.
If artists such as Perez and Blades have proven surprisingly successful in helping Panama’s young musicians rediscover their jazz roots, larger and more pressing issues have blocked them at the border.
For starters, the aforementioned lack of a recording industry, and a concert-promotion infrastructure to match, leaves Panamanians virtually unable to send their art outside the country. Unlike American and European musicians, who can cut and burn their own CDs relatively cheaply at home, Panamanians generally don’t have this option. The computer and recording technology required is well beyond the means of musicians in a country where the per capita annual income is $4,020.
Worse, Panama’s young musicians are virtually on their own when it comes to learning about their own music. Top-notch rehearsal bands, such as Paz’s organization, are the exception, not the rule. The emerging Panama Jazz Festival, which gave young players a rare chance to hear such American heroes as tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist John Pattituci, has taken place just twice (in January and in 2003).
Jazz takes back seat
And the country’s two major educational institutions — the National Conservatory and the University of Panama’s School of Fine Arts — focus on European classical music while mostly sidestepping Panamanian jazz.
“The main challenge is breaking the educational model in Panama, which is based on the European conservatory tradition, not the Panama jazz tradition,” says Javier Carrizo, a jazz activist and founder of the country’s leading jazz organization, the Fundacion Violeta por el Arte.
As he sits on a plaza overlooking the rush of traffic in downtown Panama City, where stoplights are few and horns never stop honking, Carrizo bristles at the sad state of affairs.
“About three years ago, Danilo Perez wanted to give a free workshop for students at the conservatory,” he says. “And the dean of the music school asked for his curriculum!
“This is like asking Sean Connery for his curriculum for teaching drama.
“In Panama [schools], they emphasize academics, not music.”
Adds Perez, “Compared to the United States or Cuba, we are lacking education.”
And that’s not all that’s sorely missing. During the recent Panama Jazz Festival, the French music producer Vincent Rousseau struggled to find adequate drums for visiting musicians to play and other instruments for locals who can’t afford them.
“At a major festival, like Montreal’s, you can get a drummer anything he wants — the exact size, brand, anything — they have a warehouse where they keep everything,” says Rousseau, speaking over breakfast at a seaside hotel.
“Here, we have trouble finding a decent drum set. A good drum kit can cost $10,000 to $15,000, and they don’t have that kind of money here.”
So young talents in Panama find themselves with two choices: Try to pick up the techniques of jazz on the fly — in rehearsal bands such as Paz’s or at the occasional jazz festival or wherever else the music surfaces — or get out of Panama as fast as possible, as the country’s jazz musicians have done for roughly a century.
Those who do often head to the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, where Perez studied and now teaches and where other Panamanians have ventured before launching careers in the States.
When they arrive at Berklee, or other U.S. music schools, they are astonished at what they didn’t know about the inner workings of the music, despite their already high level of accomplishment as performers.
“At Berklee, they bombard you with so much information at once, they tell you all these things that you didn’t know existed when you were still in Panama,” says Luigie Gonzalez, a Panamanian composer-producer who’s now based in Los Angeles.
He’s speaking by phone during a break in producing a recording session, a career that he does not believe would have been available to him if he had stayed in Panama.
Like Gonzalez, generations of Panamanian musicians left the country throughout the 20th Century, and most never returned, leaving Panama a shadow of what it once was in world musical culture.
In recent years, however, that trend has begun to reverse, at least among a small but determined group of Panamanian masters who have made personal sacrifices to try to revive their country’s indigenous musical culture.
Perez, who’s based in Boston, spent much of the 1990s bypassing several high-paying international concert engagements to teach master classes for free in Panama and to perform in the Jamboree, a precursor of the Panama Jazz Festival he initiated two years ago.
Blades, who was thriving in Hollywood as a singer-turned-movie actor, last September returned home to become minister of tourism, which enables him to champion Panamanian music by targeting funds in its direction. Like Perez, he has paid a price, putting his lucrative film career on hold.
Helping the cause
And artists such as trumpeter Paz, drummer Icaza and saxophonist Garnett have moved back home, each for a different reason, but all with the hopes of helping to launch Panama’s gifted but hard-pressed young players.
“When I left, in the 1960s,” says Garnett, who went on to establish a stellar career playing with Miles Davis and others, “it was always with the intent to come back.
“I wanted to get knowledge and fame in the States, then come back and teach,” adds Garnett, after playing an explosive set at the Panama Jazz Festival, his eruptions drawing some of the loudest ovations of the event.
“I’ve found that the young kids are getting a taste and a flavor of jazz, and they’re hungry for it.
“But, still, there are not enough clubs, not as much as there used to be when I left.”
Even so, the talented young musicians and seasoned artists coming home seem to be forming a critical mass. With superb elder statesmen such as flutist Ibrahim Merel, percussionist-vocalist Antonio Bermudez and singer Danilo Perez Sr. sharing concert stages and rehearsal rooms with a new generation of talent, Panama appears ready to reclaim not only its past but its current place in the jazz pantheon.
Perez Jr. already has begun making plans for next year’s festival; pianist Carlos Campos is readying his application to Berklee; Icaza has formed a new band; and Garnett has gathered around him a formidable ensemble of twentysomething talents.
“We started this movement 15 years ago,” says Carrizo, the jazz organizer, “and now I think we see the start of the results.
“I believe Panama will become the jazz mecca of Central America, if we’re lucky.”
And if we are.
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Our team in Panama
Howard Reich has covered music in Chicago since 1976, joining the Tribune in 1983. His assignments have taken him to many cultural capitals, including Havana, Montreal, London, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw and Prague. He is the author of two books, “Van Cliburn” and “Jelly’s Blues,” written with William Gaines.
Phil Velasquez is a staff photographer, having come to the Tribune after two decades at the Chicago Sun-Times. He has traveled the U.S. covering Major League Baseball, the NFL and the NBA, and he covered the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. This is Velasquez’s second series with Reich, the two having covered music in Havana in 2002.
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hreich@tribune.com
ON THE WEB: To hear music of Panama, view photos and read previous stories in this series, go to WWW. CHICAGOTRIBUNE.COM/PANAMA
