Paquito D'Rivera at the Library of Congress 5/31/02

by Alan Greenblatt

Part of me wishes I had grown up to be Paquito D'Rivera. The sax and clarinet player is a Cuban exile, having defected in 1981. He was quickly taken up by members of the New York jazz scene and played a lot with Dizzy Gillespie during that trumpeters latter days. He remains one of the brightest stars in the Latin jazz firmament and also has been getting a lot of work writing classical-type compositions on commission. Both sides of his career were represented Friday at the Library of Congress.

His classical pieces were aided a lot by his fluid pianist, Alon Yavnai, who hails from the hearty jazz scene in Tel Aviv, and the soloists. Regina Carter is, like D'Rivera, a conservatory-trained jazz head and she played his characteristic long and crowded melodic lines with acuity and later showed herself a quick-thinking improviser. Marina Piccinini was completely hot in a tight, underwear-less outfit and, oh yeah, could play the flute, too. Somehow D'Rivera's melodic verbosity sounded especially impressive coming out of a flute. Brenda Feliciano has a nice voice but was stuck reciting some stagnant words and lyrics provided by D'Rivera's collaborator Annie Colina. Example from "Song For Peace": "It's up to us to make our dream come true. Reach for the stars."

In the concert's second half, D'Rivera played with his regular quintet. Like his classical work, his jazz compositions are basically pastiches. As he admitted, you can steal somebody's ideas and harmonies and get away with it if you dedicate the piece to them. And so we heard tributes to Dizzy and Chick Corea and Mario Bauza and Chucho Valdes.

D'Rivera loves a medley. He plays with a lot of energy without getting frenetic, blowing his face red and listing heavily to one side when he isn't dancing. He likes showmanship, as when he punctuates notes with the fingers of one hand when he doesn't need them on his horn. He tells lots of jokes, making fun of his own "Australian" accent and saying stuff like, "You know how much Dizzy loved the music of the illegal aliens."

He's a cheerful presence, clearly having fun, projecting the sense from the stage that nothing in life really gets him down. If his tunes are neither original nor striking -- if you have a hard time remembering what he played just moments after the song is done -- it all goes down agreeably and leaves you feeling affection for this man. I envy him.