Panama Jazz Festival 2008: the Plaza Catedral free concert

The advertised idiom was jazz, but the show started in
the Panamanian Cimarron tradition of congo dancing

Scenes from the Jazz Festival's free concert in Plaza Catedral
photos and captions by Eric Jackson

The Panama Jazz Festival has several missions. The concerts that most people identify as the festival are as a whole one of them, but among these there are the $150 a ticket fundraising gala at the Teatro Nacional, the ATLAPA concerts for the mainstream jazz fans that come from near and far for the festival and the Saturday free concert for the masses of all income brackets and nationalities at ATLAPA. This year they added a Friday afternoon family concert at ATLAPA, which this reporter did not attend.

Of course, much of the festival is and has been about education of young musicians and talent hunting by the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, a pedagogical mission that this year was augmented by reinforcement from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, the International Association for Jazz Education and the Puerto Rico Conservatory.

Yet even within those variations on the concert theme, there are different purposes playing out. If the education of youngsters and continuing education of local and regional professional musicians is one emphasis, these festivals also put other Panamanian musical genres on display for the jazz masters and anyone who knows the history of jazz would reasonably expect that a result of this will be the incorporation of some of our home-grown sounds and pageantry into the international language of jazz. At the Teatro Nacional it was bolero --- not Panamanian in origin, but part of our musical soundscape --- on display. At Plaza Catedral the show began with rhythms and dancing from the congo tradition that was developed by runaway slaves who set up their African-style villages in the Panamanian jungle during Spanish colonial times.

From there the show continued, with the jazz bands who had entertained the previous three nights and a few more acts, national and international. Again, Stanley Jordan, who closed out the free concert, was the big hit. But there was so much more, as you will see. You may want to hit some of the hyperlinks on this page and hear as well.

Dave Samuels, vibraphonist and leader of the Caribbean Jazz Project. How is this "Caribbean?" Well, although there are no visibly identifiable rastamen in the band, so much of their music is Afro-Cuban influenced and Cuba, of course, is the largest of the Greater Antilles, which are islands in the Caribbean Sea. Every blue-eyed Colon buay ought to know how expansive the concept "Caribbean" and how diverse the peoples of the islands and littoral of the Caribbean Sea can be. Not to know that is to risk being found "not irie" by a Rastafarian jury.

Kelley Johnson? She didn't play at the Teatro Nacional or ATLAPA, but the two-time US State Department musical ambassador and her band put on a very good show at Plaza Catedral.

Trumpeter Gordon Au, a young man from Sacramento who played with his fellow grad students in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance band, is both
an excellent musician and, as you can tell from his website, a talented writer.

Dino Nugent, like Danilo Pérez a Fulbright Scholar,
may be the most outstanding Panamanian musician
about whom few music fans abroad have ever heard.
He played jazz on this afternoon with a local band.

The New England Conservatory band's Portuguese
vocalist Sara Serpa added an etherial quality that
suggested Brazilian jazz influences to this reporter

Kim Thompson, drummer for the Tia Fuller Quartet as well as for Beyoncé's traveling
band, wowed the crowd at the Casco Viejo's Parque Catedral on this Saturday night

Cat Russell is not only a wonderful singer, she's Panamanian if she wants to be, as her
dad was a noteworthy Panamanian musician and composer who excelled in the USA

special report