Danilo Pérez, a great jazz master if ever there was one (youngest member of Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra in 1989, then member of Wayne Shorter’s quartet in 2001), is piling up the accolades. With Lumen, he offers an exploration of refined, sophisticated jazz that pleasantly blends the rhythmic complexity of Afro-Panamanian vernacular music and Latino music in general, with the harmonic richness of modern jazz and art music, thanks to the scintillating Bohuslän Big Band. The Swedish ensemble is no stranger to inspiring collaborations: Maria Schneider, Gregory Porter, Joe Lovano, Nils Landgren.
What we hear in Lumen is the deployment of a harmonic construction based on the use of tetrachords. This is an academic notion which, in its Perezian version, has the aesthetic effect of creating broad, sunny panoramas, with the occasional well-defined shadowy passages.
Music lovers will come away with the satisfaction of having been satiated by an opulent musical offering that retains a strong connection with the democratic and welcoming aspect of jazz. Jazz that has retained close links with the nobility of the ‘popular’ roots of its rhythms and melodies.
Great jazz that’s sophisticated, welcoming and inclusive.
