Mid-week welcomes back Jazz in the Park and the arrival of Danilo Perez

22nd October 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Geraldine Wyckoff
Contributing Writer

“I’m like the happiest man ever right now,” Emanuel Lain jubilantly exclaims on the return of the Jazz in the Park music series to Louis Armstrong Park. The popular evening event, which was founded and led by Lain, took a hiatus and changed its format and locale earlier in the fall by moving to the Carter Theater. The adjustment was due, in part, because of Lain’s job relocation to Austin, Texas. He didn’t feel he could produce the labor intensive festival from so far away.

After receiving a vast amount of phone calls from folks who had been involved in the festival as food and craft vendors as well as fans and community members, Lain had a change of heart and enlisted his “capable and experienced team” to take over production of the shows.

“When you take stuff away from people it impacts them,” Lain says. “We had a whole lot of testimonials about how not having Jazz in the Park affected their livelihood. We were distraught that we put people in bad situations. So we decided just to have it.”

Jazz in the Park kicks off again on Thursday, October 25, with headliner Corey Henry & the Treme Funktet. “He’s been there from the beginning,” says Lain of the tremendously talented trombonist and vocalist who grew up in the 6th Ward and always draws a crowd of friends. Opening at 5 p.m. is Rick David & the Five Funky Brothers.

Not long after the announcement that Jazz in the Park was returning for its regular Thursday evening shows at Armstrong Park, Lain got a call that also boosted his mood. The City offered to pay for the second lines – the social and pleasure clubs and the brass bands – which lively up the crowd before the stage bands get going. For budgetary reasons, this portion of the event was likely to be cut.

“That was like wow – to come full circle,” Lain says remembering that previously the organization felt it received little appreciation or recognition. “This new administration, I can’t thank God enough for them.”

Piano Master Danilo Perez – Music with a Mission

Danilo Perez, are world-renowned pianist as a leader, 18-year member of the remarkable Wayne Shorter Quartet, founder of the Panama Jazz Festival and Berklee Global Jazz Institute, arrives in New Orleans this week to perform Wednesday night, October 24, as part of UNO’s Jazz at the Sandbar series and Thursday, October 25, at Snug Harbor. Rather than coming down alone, the Panama-born, Grammy-winning composer, educator and social activist will bring down students from his Jazz Institute to play at both gigs.

“What I’m doing is providing an amazing platform where youth can collaborate,” Perez explains. “The institute’s main goal is to give opportunities to gifted musicians to have enough experience and become ambassadors and social activists as well as artists.”

“My whole thing in the next part of my life is to connect all the young musicians from around the world and use the music as a tool to create an inter-cultural dialogue. I feel musicians should definitely become predominant and active in the creation of new ideas in how to solve the issues that we have with peace and diplomacy along with the challenges that we have as human beings.”

Perez, who performed at Jazz Fest for the first time in 1998, also felt strongly that his students should come to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

“You cannot learn this music without having that experience,” he offers. “New Orleans is a fundamental city. They breathe jazz, they breathe music, they breathe culture. In order to change the world through jazz you have to have a foundation.”

“It did change me when I went there for the first time,” he continues. “When I came to the United States from Panama (in the 1980s) I saw jazz as something that they do in New York and it was something that came from the United States. But when I went to New Orleans, New Orleans made me feel so welcome that I started researching the connection between New Orleans and Panama and I found many. It’s always felt like home to me. It’s a place where I get my energy back.”

Perez credits coming to New Orleans as helping him find his identity as a Panamanian. That awakening was also reinforced, he says, when performing the music of pianist Thelonious Monk with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis back in 1995. Another strong element has been playing with Louisiana-born drummer Brian Blade for the last 20 years. “He’s always kept me on my toes and always kept me connected to the essence of the music,” Perez declares.

Perez’s musical prowess and humanitarian philosophy stem from many sources. His father was an educator who, in 1967, wrote a thesis making a case that music should be a part of curriculums to teach other subjects like science and mathematics.

“My next teacher in jazz was (trumpeter) Mr. Dizzy Gillespie and he taught me that jazz was the greatest tool for diplomacy and inter-cultural dialogue,” Perez points out. “Wayne (Shorter) taught me that music is for the betterment of humanity and that you can’t grow as a musician and not grow as a human being.”

“Groove them out!” Danilo Perez instructs musicians as a means of dealing with societal and political problems faced by the world today. “They mess with the groove that we create.”

This article originally published in the October 22, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.