Jazzman up close

When trumpeter Tiger Okoshi played the Kimmel Center in November, he got a surprise during the encore. Pianist Danilo Pérez walked on while the band played "St. James Infirmary," and began adding chords and lines of shadowy complexity, transforming a song of antique origin into a progressive statement all his own.

Pérez, 41, a major-label recording artist originally from Panama, is now in his fifth year as artistic adviser for the Kimmel's Mellon-sponsored Jazz Up Close concert series. Though he lives with his wife and two young daughters in Boston, where he teaches, he makes a point of coming to Philadelphia for the shows, to host artist chats, sit in with the bands, and spread his infectious good cheer.

"I think he's missed three concerts in five years," says Mervon Mehta, the Kimmel Center's vice president for programming and education.

Mehta met Pérez while directing the Ravinia Festival near Chicago, and resolved to work with the pianist in the future. "He's in the thick of so many artists' lives," Mehta observes, "because he crosses to the older generations and also knows every great kid coming out of the schools."

As adviser, Pérez brainstorms with the Kimmel staff, conferring on artist bookings, themes for each season, and so forth. But on Friday he will step fully into his musician role, playing Verizon Hall with the Wayne Shorter Quartet, led by the saxophone giant, with John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums.

Shorter, a native of Newark, N.J., rose meteorically in the early '60s and hasn't stopped evolving. His horn, volatile yet sweet in sound, is all over Herbie Hancock's Grammy-winning River: The Joni Letters.

The quartet, now in its eighth year, represents jazz interplay at its most advanced and allusive, dealing in a form-beyond-form that Shorter calls "zero gravity." There will be no rehearsal, according to Pérez. The result, he says, will be "even more unknown than the unknown we thought we knew. It's the most aggressive exposure in the moment I've ever experienced." (Trumpeter Terell Stafford and his quartet will open for Shorter's group.)

On May 3, Pérez will return to the smaller Perelman Theater, the headquarters of Jazz Up Close, for a collaboration with flamenco-influenced guitarist Gerardo Núñez.

This year's season, with the them Jazz Goes Global, has featured artists from Japan, Africa, Canada, and Eastern and Western Europe. For Pérez, however, the mission isn't just to illustrate jazz's international reach. It's also to stake Philadelphia's claim on that map, with the goal of expanding the local audience and attracting diverse, top-class performers to town.

"Hopefully we're reminding people how influential Philly has been in jazz," he says, "and creating events so that people know more about the history of their own music."

Phil Schaap, curator for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, admires Pérez's efforts and cites parallels with performing arts centers in Newark, Chicago, San Francisco and Minneapolis.

"These organizations always try to create a tie-in to their location, to highlight the area's connection to jazz heritage," Schaap says. "And someone like Danilo, Jon Faddis, Joshua Redman or Wynton Marsalis is often there as the point guy from the musician-performer perspective."

In early 2005, Pérez launched the Danilo Pérez Foundation, which provides scholarships for young Panamanian and other Latin American music students, and he hopes to develop student exchanges between Philly and Panama.

"With the next generation it's going to be a challenge to make them culturally aware," he says. "It's important for a kid to go to another country and understand the music from the bottom up."

Pérez has made education a central component of the annual Panama Jazz Festival, which he founded in 2003. He has also traversed Panama as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.

"I got to know a level beyond poverty, which is misery," he recalls. "I grew up in poverty, but I didn't know misery. It was shocking to see in my own country, right behind my door. . . . You really witnessed the healing power of music."

As the son of bolero singer Danilo Pérez Sr., the young Danilo absorbed music from the cradle. "My papa actually gave me the tools for rhythmic development," Pérez marvels, remembering how his father would help with schoolwork by turning lessons into spoken-word lyrics.

After years of classical piano study, Pérez discovered jazz, hearing a neighbor blast records by Freddie Hubbard and George Benson. Soon he would follow in the footsteps of fellow Panamanians such as bassist Santi Debriano and saxophonists Carlos Ward and Carlos Garnett. But first, having earned a bachelor's degree in electronics, he embarked on a career repairing radios and televisions.

In the early 1980s, he came to the United States to attend Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Then he transferred to Boston's Berklee College of Music (where he now teaches), a move that had its challenges.

"It was cold," Pérez says with a laugh. "The weather was drastic." And the talent level was daunting. He had quarreled with his mother about becoming a musician, and there were times when he suspected she was right. "I wanted to go back home," he admits.

But before long, Pérez was gigging with veteran vocalist Jon Hendricks. Other high-profile appearances followed. Aside from working with Shorter, Roy Haynes, Dizzy Gillespie and many others, he has received three Grammy nominations as a bandleader and has shared a Grammy for the Wayne Shorter Quartet's Beyond the Sound Barrier in 2005. His music, on such albums as Panamonk, Motherland, and the forthcoming Across the Crystal Sea, as well as the new big-band EP Panama Suite, has pushed Latin jazz into ambitious and newly hybridized terrain, setting a potent example for younger players of all backgrounds.

It was on TV, the device that Pérez used to repair, that Wayne Shorter first caught sight of the hot new pianist from Panama.

"He was playing with Dizzy," Shorter says in a phone interview. "They put the camera on Danilo's hands, and I said, 'Uh-oh. This is a guy.' When we met later, I can remember the feeling, like when we were kids and we said, 'Let's go outside and play.' That's the feeling. Danilo is open to whatever comes, in that zero-gravity kind of way. When we become weightless, he doesn't start looking for things to hold on to."