Wayne Shorter, Rubén Blades, and the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés will be among the performers at the sixth annual Panama Jazz Festival, which begins Jan. 12 and continues through Jan. 17.
The presence of Shorter’s remarkable quartet on the Panama bill is hardly surprising, since the pianist in that group is Danilo Pérez, a native of Panama who founded the festival and whose foundation coordinates its educational activities. Nonetheless, it has to be considered a coup for a festival, and a country, that don’t always get a lot of attention.
The good news is that there will be a four-day festival in New York this month devoted to the music of Thelonious Monk. The less than entirely good news is that it’s being presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Lincoln Center’s jazz operation, under the unquestionably ambitious artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis, has been controversial from the beginning. As much praise as it has garnered for raising the music’s profile and treating it with the respect it deserves, it has attracted an equal amount of criticism for hewing to an overly conservative agenda. Still, while Jazz at Lincoln Center’s focus on the old at the expense of the new has been a legitimate source of carping, I have never heard anyone suggest that its devotion to major figures like Monk and Duke Ellington is a mistake. The issue is how that devotion is expressed. Read more »
