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 Entertainment | March 2005 
The Paq-Man’s Half-Century
 Mark Holston - Latino Magazine
| Havana-born saxophone and clarinet virtuoso Paquito D’Rivera receives the coveted “Jazz Masters” Award 50 years after his debut as a child prodigy.
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Even on the most important night of his professional life, Havana-born saxophone and clarinet virtuoso Paquito D’Rivera can’t avoid the kind of lighthearted quip that has become his calling card. “We could only get Carnegie Hall on January 10, not December 31, so we decided to call the concert ‘50 Years and 10 Nights,’ ” he wisecracks of the lavish, all-star studded extravaganza that was created to observe his half-century in music. He first took to the stage, a tiny curved soprano saxophone in hand, in 1954 at the age of 6 after several months of intensive tutoring by his father Tito, a classical saxophonist. Today, he’s widely regarded as one of the top woodwind artists in the world.
The choice of the planet’s most revered concert venue for the event was more than symbolic. “My fascination with Carnegie Hall came when my father played for me the historic recording of clarinetist Benny Goodman and his orchestra, recorded there in 1938,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Wow, what is that?’ At the time, I understood ‘Carnegie Hall’ as carne frijol! I was a stupid kid! But ever since then, I dreamed about being a musician in New York.”
D’Rivera’s special night featured a once-in-a-lifetime assembly of stellar talent, ranging from classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Dominican pianist Michel Camilo to Cuban conga legend Cándido and Brazilian vocalist Rosa Passos, his wife Brenda Feliciano, an opera singer, and members of The Youth Orchestra of the Americas. Also on hand was a trio of octogenarian Cuban artists—Bebo Valdés, a storied pianist, and Las Hermanas Márquez, master practitioners of the Cuban guaracha. “I’ve never seen a concert event that put together so many different kinds of music,” D’Rivera proudly says. “From classical to Brazilian, Cuban and jazz, we had everything.”
As documented by the unending series of accolades and awards he has accumulated since arriving in the U.S., D’Rivera enjoys a stature virtually unparalleled in the history of Hispanic musicians in the U.S. This year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) named him a recipient of its coveted “Jazz Masters” award, making him only the second foreign-born artist (British pianist Marian McPartland is the other) to receive the honor that has been bestowed since 1982 on such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie. He is also the youngest by many years to have been named an honoree. “Anyone looking for a picture depicting the joy of music-making need look no further than the optimistic visage of saxophonist-clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera,” NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said at the annual conference of the International Association for Jazz Education in Long Beach, California in early January.
It’s not surprising that D’Rivera’s virtuosity has seduced even the most jaded music critics. In 2004, the Jazz Journalists Association named him “Clarinetist of the Year,” the most recent polls of critics and music fans he has conquered in the past two decades. And, in one of the most important barometers of popular and critical success, D’Rivera has tallied two Grammys and four Latin Grammys since a recording by Irakere in 1979 first captured the music world’s most sought-after award. In 2003, he became only the second jazz artist ever (trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was the first) to win Grammys for both jazz and classical recordings for Historia del Soldado (DD&R), a program by composer Igor Stravinsky, and Brazilian Dreams (Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild), with the vocal ensemble The New York Voices.
And, academia has long been aware of D’Rivera’s contributions to classical music and jazz. In 2003, Boston’s famed Berklee School of Music awarded him a doctorate honoris causa in music, a particularly fitting distinction because of his ever-expanding role as a music educator. “The youth orchestra that I’ve been working with recently is marvelous,” he says of Costa Rica-based Youth Orchestra of the Americas, a professional class symphony orchestra of 103 young musicians. “They come from throughout the hemisphere, from Canada to Patagonia,” he says of the orchestra’s members. “I’ve done tours with them, as have Yo-Yo Ma and Plácido Domingo. It’s very important, because music keeps people away from violence, gangs and all that bullshit.”
While awards are important, the respect D'Rivera has earned from his closest associates also is of great value. "Paquito is only interested in playing one kind of music—good music," says Dave Samuels, the jazz vibraphonist with whom he co-founded the Grammy Award winning group The Caribbean Jazz Project in the mid 1990s. "He has the rare ability to play, improvise and compose music in a number of different styles, always being both respectful and innovative."
Argentine trumpeter Diego Urcola, who has been a key member of D'Rivera's working group for the past decade, puts his appreciation of the saxophonist in wholly personal terms. "He is responsible in a big way for my own career and I'm very proud of my musical relationship with him and even more to be his friend," says the native of Buenos Aires. "He's very generous with his friends and musicians on and off the stage,"Urcola adds. "In all this years I have never heard one bad comment from any musician about Paquito. Everyone wants to work with him."
D’Rivera’s professional career in Cuba blossomed early. Born in 1948, he was performing with the National Theater Orchestra of Havana at the age of 10. He studied classical music at the Havana Conservatory of Music and performed with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra at the age of 17. He was a founding member of the seminal group Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna and, in 1973, helped create Irakere, the groundbreaking instrumental ensemble that also included trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and pianist Jesús “Chucho” Valdés. In 1980, while on tour with Irakere in Spain, he defected and fulfilled his lifelong dream of pursuing a music career in the States. It didn’t take long for him to take the U.S. jazz scene by storm, landing a recording contract with Columbia Records and beginning a series of fruitful associations with such leading names of the jazz, Latin and classical music worlds as Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bauzá, Tito Puente, Michel Camilo, Yo-Yo Ma, the Turtle Island String Quartet and The Caribbean Jazz Project, an all-star Latin jazz group he helped found. He has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, among many other classical music ensembles. His career has produced more than 30 albums.
Fans who have only followed D‘Rivera’s music career may not be aware that he‘s also known for his literary skills. “The other thing I’ve done all my life is writing,” he notes. “The problem was that while living in a dictatorial system, I had no escape for my literary writing. I write what I think, and in such a country, it’s difficult to do.“ His memoir My Sax Life, written in Spanish and published in Spain in 1998, has been translated into English and will be published in here this June by Northwestern University Press. A new book, ¡Oh, La Habana!, just published by Spain’s E&T Editores, reveals D’Rivera’s talents as a novelist. “It’s the name of a rumba,” he notes of the title. “I wrote it two years ago, and 99 percent of the characters are real. When I had to go too far,” he laughs, “I changed the names!”
Another book in conceptual stages at the moment will be titled Portraits and Landscapes. “It’s about people I have known, because I’ve been around so many great people, like Dizzy Gillespie and Yo-Yo Ma, that I want to talk about things that happen on the road. That’s a nice name for a book, no?”
Any conversation with D’Rivera sooner or later turns to the subject of his native land under the dictatorial rule of Fidel Castro. Like all Cuban expatriates, he longs for the day when Castro draws his last breath, but admits he doesn’t have a strong sense of what will follow Castro’s passing. “Who knows, and I’ll tell you why,” he states. “In China, Mao Tse-tung has beendead for many, many years, but it’s still the same system. . .The answer in Cuba isn’t that Fidel has to die; the system has to die. So, I have no answer, only hopes.”
It is the topic of music, however, that brings out D’Rivera’s most animated side. Although he cemented his early reputation in the U.S. through his fiery technique on the alto saxophone, in recent years his clarinet playing, on both jazz and classical recordings, is what has earned him new fame. However, when pressed to name his favorite instrument, he is characteristically diplomatic before his innate sense of humor takes over and he reveals his true feelings. “You love all of your children the same,” he says chuckling, “but, for some reason, there is always one that’s a little more special, and for me, that’s the clarinet.”
Along with his prowess as an instrumentalist and composer, D’Rivera is also known as a jokester always ready with a clever one-liner. “Two of the most bitter men in the history of jazz were Benny Goodman and Miles Davis,” he comments. “They had everything! How can you explain that? I never met them, but what I heard about was their bitterness and hate. Dizzy Gillespie was black, and he faced the same kinds of discrimination, but he was jovial. Maybe it’s because I’m Cuban, I don’t know. My mother and father both had a great sense of humor.”
Although he has lived in the U.S. for almost a quarter of a century, D’Rivera still finds some characteristics of his adopted homeland perplexing. “One of the amusing aspects of living in a democracy,” he observes from his home in Weehawken, New Jersey, “is that Americans like to complain about everything. But, perhaps the point of it is that they can. They have freedom. But every time I think about complaining about something, I’m reminded of the political prisoners in Cuba, especially the poets and writers. These people are in jail just for speaking their hearts. ”
Indeed, on most days, you won’t hear Paquito D’Rivera complaining. Universally admired, at the peak of his career, and scoring one success after another, his world is filled with triumphs, artistic collaborations and friendships with today’s most renowned musicians. “Almost every day,” he happily admits, “I ask myself, ‘Am I dreaming?’”
Funeral services will be held in Palm Springs, Tucson and Los Angeles. |
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