Danilo Pérez
| Danilo Pérez | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Born |
29 December 1965 Panama |
| Genres | Jazz, Latin jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Years active | 1989–present |
| Labels | Novus, Impulse!, GRP, Verve, ArtistShare, Concord, EmArcy, Mack Avenue |
| Associated acts | Dizzy Gillespie, Wayne Shorter |
| Website | www |
Danilo Pérez (born 29 December 1965) is a Panamanian pianist and composer.
Pérez was born in Panama in 1965 and started on piano when he was three-years-old. At ten, he studied at the National Conservatory in Panama. He moved to the U.S. to study music, attending Indiana University of Pennsylvania and then switching to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. At Berklee, he worked with Jon Hendricks, Claudio Roditi, and Terence Blanchard.
In 1989, Perez became a member of Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra. The album Live at the Royal Festival Hall won a Grammy Award. He remained with the band until Gillespie died in 1992. He stated in a press report for the Independent that "one of the things Dizzy taught me was to learn about my own heritage even more than I knew already. He said it was more important for jazz for you to get to what your roots are, than to learn about other things".
For the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Perez and Marsalis played together again. He performed as a special guest at President Clinton's Inaugural Ball, played piano on the Bill Cosby TV show theme song, and participated in the Grammy-winning album, Danzon.
In 2000, he joined Wayne Shorter in a quartet with John Patitucci and Brian Blade. He has played concerts with the group extensively since then, and appears on all four of the recordings Shorter has made during this period: Footprints Live! (2002), Alegría (2003), Beyond the Sound Barrier (2005), and Without a Net (2013).
Perez was appointed artistic director of the Berklee College of Music Global Jazz Institute, a program for talented jazz students from around the world.
In 1994, he released his first solo album, Danilo Perez, and then his second, The Journey, in 1995. He performed The Journey in concert with the Panamanian Symphony Orchestra the same year. The album is a musical account of the trip African slaves made across the ocean, beginning with "The Capture", through "The Taking", "Chains", The Voyage", and ending with "Libre Spiritus". David Sanchez and Giovanni Hidalgo play on the album, which was recorded in two days at the Power Station in New York City. The album made it to the top ten jazz lists in The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Billboard magazine. It was named one of the best albums of the 1990s by Downbeat magazine.
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