Hot Bop from a Tropical Gent

By JAY COCKS

Sax Player Paquito D'Rivera soars high on an expatriate dream

He had to leave the country to find home, and he had to be careful to give no sign at all of his travel plans. Passing through Madrid on a band tour in the spring of 1980, Sax Player Paquito D'Rivera, Cuban born and Cuban bred, was at the airport, bag packed as usual for another gig. Inside his luggage, however, was a carefully weighted assortment of stones, an army boot and a piece of a baseball bat. By the time the bag was stashed on the plane, D'Rivera was on his way into Madrid, planning his route to the American embassy. Quite a nice piece of amateur cold warring, all things considered. New World, Third World, it makes no difference to the music.

Paquito D'Rivera, 35, may sound like a propagandist's dream, but the bopped-up, romantic, salty and sensuous jazz that he makes recognizes no real political boundary. It has roots equally in the hothouse Latin rhythms of his homeland and in the high-flying horns of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Lee Konitz. Adapting them, molding them and memorably melding all these elements has got D'Rivera three solid Columbia albums, of which the most recent, Live at Keystone Korner, is selling nicely, thanks. He has also become a musician whose talents are much in demand for session work, as well as a concert performer whose travels, starting last month at Mikell's in New York City, are keeping him hopping from Manhattan to Helsinki to Fort Worth. Home for a jazz musician, it is worth remembering, is the place where music flourishes, which is not always the same location as one's birthplace or current address.

"In Cuba," says Paquito D'Rivera, "jazz is a four-letter word." So, at the age of 32, he came to New York. Jazz may be spelled the same way in America, may even be locked into a perpetual cultural rearguard action, but at least it does not carry all kinds of touchy political ramifications. "Jazz music isn't forbidden in Cuba," D'Rivera elaborates, "but if you do that kind of music, they will put an eye on you. You're going to be like pro-American or something, you know." He also recalls some advice given him when he was playing with the fine Cuban band Irakere in the mid-'70s. "If you want to keep playing bebop on your saxophone, you do it, but don't say it. Don't say jazz. Call it 'progressive Cuban socialist music,' and then you play bebop."

D'Rivera left a lot back in Cuba, including a wife, from whom he is now divorced, and their son Franco, 8, for whom his father still yearns. "I am suffering a lot because of my son," D'Rivera says, "but if they put me again in the airport of Madrid, I would do the same thing. I am in love with my country. But my country is part of my past life. I don't want to return."

D'Rivera has been blowing his horn since the age of five, when his father gave him a custom-made soprano sax. He played with a Cuban symphony orchestra at the age of eleven and made his first trip to New York when he was twelve. By then, he had already plunged into the swift currents of bop by listening hard to Charlie Parker records his father had bought.

"The thing had been in my mind for too many years to come here, even before the revolution, before Castro," he says now. "I never got out of that country on a tour before my son was born, so he was a kind of hostage. But there is a moment in every person's life where you have to do what you have to do." Done, then, but not undone. When D'Rivera arrived on American shores in October 1980 with the considerable help and support of CBS Records President and inveterate Jazz Fanatic Bruce Lundvall, he found what he calls "a culture of quality. This country is not at all perfect. But still, Americans don't know the country they have."

They also, as the newly arrived exile discovered, tend to a certain confusion about other lands. The tasty title track of his second album, Mariel, summons memories of the Cuban port from which the boat people sailed in 1980. D'Rivera, already fatigued with explaining this and with insisting that "all the Marielitos are not so bad," has taken recently to saying that the song is about the leading lady of Star 80.

The Cuban inflections keep the temperature high in Paquito's distinctive brand of bop. "He really is a pure jazz player with strong Afro-Cuban roots in his music," says Lundvall, who has moved on to become president of Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records. "You hear that Latin fire. He has a sound that is totally identifiable." Paquito's easy access to the American jazz mainstream is largely attributable to his zest and finesse on the alto and soprano sax, and partly ascribable to the fact that he is playing in a familiar groove, which may stray in a friendly fashion from the melody but never moves entirely out of the neighborhood.

Avant-gardists might applaud his lyrical technique and solid bebop chops while nurturing doubts about his innovative abilities. D'Rivera tends a little toward caution himself--"I like electronics," he says, "but I am very careful with it"--and, even when searching for fresh inspiration, tends to stay close to the roots.

His next album will include a song written for the great jazz vocalist Carmen McRae, and yes, when he plays the tune live, he is often asked whether Samba for Carmen was inspired by the star of those '40s musicals who wore fruit on her hats. He is also exploring the tricky intricacies of Venezuelan music, which remains relatively insulated from outside influences and whose rhythms he describes as "very complicated, very interesting."

D'Rivera has set up housekeeping in Manhattan with Singer Brenda Feliciano.

with whom he composed the sexy syncopations of New York ! You on Mariel. It pleases him still to call himself "a tropical gentleman." and there is a neat kind of hipster fitness to the description. Although he makes periodic pilgrimages to Miami for sunshine and real Cuban black beans, he has himself brought more than a measure of musical heat to his own chilly adopted city, and to a very cool scene. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Mary Ann French/New York

With reporting by Mary Ann French/New York