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Since day one of the first Panama Jazz Festival it has been physically impossible for one person to catch the entire event. Yes, one can attend all the concerts, which is something I recommend. However, the main part of the Panama Jazz Festivals is educational and during the day there are all these workshops, seminars and auditions, usually several underway at any given time.

The Panamanian public school system is scandalously impervious to any and all efforts from the private sector to lend a hand, and most of the private schools have their own weird internal politics. So here comes Danilo Pérez at a time when Panamanian schools are on vacation to share some of his success with serious students of music of all ages, from Panama and all over Latin America. And notice at the press conference at the start of this year's festival graduates of the two Panama City public schools with the wildest reputations: Artes y Oficios alumnus Pérez and the tourism minister, Instituto Nacional grad Rubén Blades.

The festivals are always a good chance for talented students from the Berklee College of Music, its crosstown Boston rival the New England Conservatory and usually other educational institutions to get some international exposure and broaden their horizons by a Panama gig. This year the Conservatorio de Musica de Puerto Rico and the elite Golandsky Institute piano school are pitching in with the educational effort.

Also passing on the spark of inspiration to another generation are many of Panama's working musicians, for whom the festival is more than a paying gig but also a chance to formally and informally share the knowledge of their craft with a younger generation.

But do I want to say "improvisation" to describe the concert that the New England Conservatory Jazz Quintet gave on the afternoon of the festival's second day? I don't know that to be true, although I suspect that it probably was the case with respect to some of the solos. They may, however, have planned every single note and phrase.

How to describe them, if one has no formal musical education? I suppose if one wanted to be mean and shallow, one might glom onto the presence of an electric guitar and note the few bars of the blues at the end and pigeonhole this band as "fusion," such that both jazz and rock purists will turn up their noses at them.

Did I catch some stuff from Dizzy Gillespie's wartime standard, A Night in Tunisia, there in the NEC band's act? If I am wrong about that, let the guys in the band correct me, because I feel no shame in admitting that they know that stuff far better than I do or ever will. Gillespie, of course, was the bebop pioneer who, along with Stan Getz, brought Latin, particularly Afro-Cuban, influences into his music. His time encompassed the rise of "fusion" in the usual jazz-rock sense, but well before that Gillespie was fusing different idioms and thus broadening the scope of jazz into the more completely international phenomenon that it is today.

In any case, the NEC's band --- Andrew Urbina on alto sax, Julian Maliandi on guitar, Michel Reis on piano, drummer Charles Burchell and bassman Tal Gamlieli --- touched on jazz standards, played some stuff I hadn't heard and were very good. Their set included a bunch of duets and trio performances, which would have to be trickier than the more usual series of solos that characterize improvisational jazz.

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I once lived with a jazz band, during the heyday of the punk rock era actually, and we used to joke about the possibilities of punk jazz, and for the journalist who gets to interview the mythical (or future legendary) Pestilential Jazz Quintet. You can improvise lots of stories in that vein.

But do you want to know another concept of "pestilential?" Traveling around Panama City has been truly hellish of late, and the street-blocking protest of the day --- lately by striking Seguro Social clerical workers --- has been only the smaller part of it. The big problem has been botched improvisations in urban transit policy.

Urban improvisations: the Cinta Costera, seen through the smog. Photo by Eric Jackson

The government's plan to replace the diablo rojo buses? It's at best half-baked, undertaken so late in the administration that the only thing that will be fully accomplishable will be a huge purchase order for buses --- about which history ought to warn us of the high potential for corruption. The infrastructure does not and will not exist for a bus rapid transit system as in the Brazilian city of Curitiba.