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From Cuba With Groove Grammy-Winning jazzman Paquito D'Rivera lives his dream in the United States Sunday, August 30, 1998 Peter B. King, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
What does winning a Grammy mean to a jazz musician? Ask Paquito D'Rivera, the expatriate Cuban saxophone and clarinet player who will perform with his United Nation Orchestra Friday at PNC Jazz at Seven Springs. D'Rivera won a Grammy in 1997 for his CD "Portraits of Cuba."
"Yesterday, I went to buy a car. I love old cars," D'Rivera says on the phone from his home outside New York City, telling the tale in his lilting, thickly accented English. "So I bought a 1964 Volkswagen. The guy [who was selling it] was into Irish music. He didn't know too much about jazz. And he said, 'What's your name?' I said, 'My name's Paquito D'Rivera.' Well of course, the name didn't mean anything to him.
"Then, when he was talking about Irish music, I said, 'I saw 'River Dance.' Amazing dancers. He said, 'Where'd you see that?' I said, 'Well, when I won a Grammy, they performed that for us.' He said, 'You won a Grammy! Wow! So you must be famous! And you must be good! And you must be the best in the world!'
"This guy, he discounted a thousand dollars from the car."
D'Rivera adds that he tried to convince the seller that winning a Grammy doesn't prove anything.
"I never believed too much in awards. I appreciate the Grammy, and I think it's better to have it than not to have it, but you know, it doesn't mean too much to me. So many other people who are not really very good - we don't have to mention names - have won Grammys. And some of the great players, great singers like Carmen McRae, never won a Grammy."
Nevertheless, the Grammy carries some dollars-and-cents clout - even beyond softening up a car salesman. Which brings us to another anecdote:
"My manager called Mexico once," D'Rivera recalls. "This is a guy who had a Latin Jazz festival in Mexico, and he didn't know who I am. My manager said, 'Well I represent Paquito D'Rivera.' The guy said, 'Paquito who?' My manager said, 'Oh you don't know the guy? He won a Grammy this year.' The guy said 'Oh! We have to have him!'
"It's a language that people understand, so you have to speak in that language, you know?"
The language D'Rivera loves most, however, is music. And the 50-year-old Havana native has been speaking it almost as long as, well, Spanish. D'Rivera's father was a saxophonist who played both classical and pop. He gave his 5-year-old son his first lessons in saxophone and clarinet and exposed him to jazz.
Billed as "Paquito D'Rivera, the Smallest Saxophone Player in the World!," he was a child prodigy who performed in cabarets and concerts, on radio and TV. He played the Weber Clarinet Concerto No. 2 with the Havana Symphony when he was 10.
D'Rivera even performed a few gigs in New York City in 1960. "I was probably not yet 12 years old. Man, that was something. To come here and see the land of Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman. That was like a dream come true."
The next 20 years would see some dreams deferred, however. Castro had taken power in 1959 and was tightening his grip on all aspects of Cuban life - including the arts. Jazz was considered the music of Yankee Imperialists.
In the '60s, Chucho Valdes, one of Cuba's greatest piano players, took D'Rivera under his wing. Valdes, D'Rivera and others formed a heavily jazz-influenced progressive dance band called Irakere in 1973.
"At that time, jazz was a four-letter word. There was not any paper, any law forbidding it, but it was not the best thing to do. They named it Irakere because they were trying to avoid the word 'jazz.' So we keep playing the jazz stuff, but we don't mention it."
The members of Irakere met Dizzy Gillespie when he performed in Cuba in 1977. Gillespie - who had helped pioneer the mixing of jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms - would become a mentor to D'Rivera and his colleague, trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. Irakere gained some international renown - enough to tour outside Cuba. In 1980, during a trip to Spain, D'Rivera sought shelter in the United States embassy and defected - as Sandoval would defect a decade later.
D'Rivera arrived on our shores with a splash - the media wrote him up, and Columbia Records signed him for a deal that produced nine albums. In 1988, his then-wife and son managed to join him in America. About the same time, D'Rivera joined Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra - a wild, wall-of-sound big band consisting of members from Oklahoma City to Peru.
When Gillespie died in 1993, D'Rivera took over as the band's music director. The band's latest CD was recorded live in Pittsburgh at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. (Guild founder Bill Strickland's work educating young people made a big impression on the saxophonist.) D'Rivera hopes the band has helped enlighten audiences about the differences between, say, a mambo, a merengue and a cumbia - to give North Americans exposure to Latin American culture beyond Carmen Miranda and Desi Arnaz. A funny guy, D'Rivera has been known to send up such stereotypes in concert by doing his Ricky Ricardo imitation.
He also co-leads the Caribbean Jazz Project with Dave Samuels and Andy Narell. He performs with his quintet, and with a chamber trio consisting of clarinet, cello and piano. Orchestras and chamber groups increasingly hire him to play as a classical soloist, or commission him to write.
"I do many things. I have to pay my rent, and I need money. So ..."
Paraphrasing Duke Ellington, he says: "To me, there's only two kinds of music, good and bad."
Asked whether he prefers performing with orchestras or improvising, he replies: "I am basically an improvising person. When I play a straight concert, and I don't improvise one note, it's like something is missing here." He laughs. "But I like to do both. I prefer to play both in the same concert, probably. It doesn't have to be hard-core jazz [with a symphony], but 99 percent of the time, I manage to improvise, over a Venezuelan waltz or over something like that."
One of the few places D'Rivera doesn't get to when he goes on the road to perform is Cuba.
"I would love to see my country again, yes. But I am afraid to go there, and I don't want to, in any way, legitimize, to give any credibility to that system by going back there. I don't want to see in my country what happened in China, where they keep abusing everybody there, and the United States declared China 'Most Favored Nation.' "
Has living in America for 18 years left him with any disappointments?
"No. None at all. None at all. I have a nice time here. I'm learning from other people, playing with a lot of great musicians and working hard. But this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a musician in New York City. So that's how I ended up."
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