Danilo Perez and His Global Messengers Spread Multi-Cultural Faith through Multi-Media, Cross-Genre Music

In two sweeping, folkloric, jazz-bending suites, ‘Crisalida’ documents the indigenous, immigrant experience

Cover art by Panamanian painter Olga Sinclair.

“I envision Crisálida as a protected space where we all come together, whether we’re addressing immigration issues, climate change, environmental justice, science, interconnecting different art forms. We need to work together to build our new crisálida, which, to me, is the emotional, mental and physical state of protection in our early development.”

Crisálida hits different.

Danilo Pérez’s new album isn’t the kind of music you crank up and dance to. It’s not even a wine-and-chill mood you keep in the background, while gathering your thoughts at the end of a long, work day.

It seeks to go deeper, into cinematic, documentary territory, an extended two-suite, eight-track, history-lesson musical meant to educate, enlighten, and elevate the immigrant, indigenous life, with calls to action to save our planet, laid bare and laid out in gorgeous, bracing colors, light and dark tones, inspirational, impressive polyrhythmic fashions, and rolling, frenzied, disturbing and disturbed tempos — aloft in strings, piano, drums, flute, and vocal variations…Spoken Word easing into incandescent vocalese, Spanish to English, and back again.

A Greek, Palestinian, Cuban, Chilean, Iraqi, Panamanian…rainbow chorus, all blended and interwoven together, represents suffering, majesty, the triumph of different.

The three-time Grammy®-winning jazz piano composer, originally from Panama, recorded Crisálida (Chrysalis) with his new Global Messengers ensemble — alumni from his Berklee College of Music’s Global Jazz Institute — and guest artists, with this in mind.

The multi-cultural line-up: Pérez on piano, Spoken Word artist/saxophonist and wife Patricia Zárate, laouto player Vasilis Kostas, cellist Naseem Alatrash, percussionist Tareq Rantisi, violinist/vocalist Layth Sidiq, and vocalist Farayi Malek, with guest artists — Ney flutist Faris Ishaq, batá drummer Román Diaz, vocalist Erini Tornesaki, and the Kalesma Children’s Choir of The Ark of the World (Kivotos tou Kosmou), based in Greece.

“These musicians are very interested in cultivating their gifts to become role models for the betterment of humanity. I love this openness of wanting to explore and connect,” explains Pérez, UNESCO Artist for Peace.

There’s also Panamanian art from painter Olga Sinclair and photographer Tito Herrera to augment the storied musical experience.

The album is set for a March 18, 2022 release on Mack Avenue Records.

Crisálida takes place in the dreams, imagination, and realities of Pérez and his venerated colleagues, split into two movements — the beginning (“La Muralla [Glass Walls] Suite”) and the end (“Frontera [Borders] Suite”). Each suite contains four tunes, a stylistic jazz/blues/world music expanse from which the pianist and his Global Messengers play upon with purpose and their heart on their sleeve.

“In the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, we talk a lot about finding new sounds through the blues and connecting to your roots – expanding the folkloric elements of where you come from. The Global Messengers are a new family that explores the power of music as a tool for inter-cultural dialogue.”

Music in all its other facets, other than Pérez’s trademark polyrhythmic catch-and-flow, is present here.

Profound, assured, gracious voices — the children’s choir and Malek’s high-registered crescendos — ascend sweetly from the chamber music of a gently twirling waltz of piano, flute, and fingers tracing strings in “Rise From Love”… before turning archly on its head with offset syncopated regret, in huge, walloping gallops from everywhere and nowhere, under Pérez’s largesse, grounded by Diaz’s rhythmic, sideways batá.

Malek introduces the dramatic rhythmic shift, sweetly earnest to darkly complicated, with the strangely unmoored, unfinished, “Where are we going? Is it light or dark? Rise From a Love…,” a loosely bound story of the African people’s forced entry into the Western world and their all-encompassing cultural impact on the music of said Western world.

“Monopatía’s (Pathways)” myriad aural gifts resound first in Kostas’ ethnically-rich, gripping string flotation (laouto), against Pérez’s contrastingly decadent downward, glancing blows, of which he’s familiar and famous. It’s the most arresting part of this Middle Eastern/African-American/Latin American/Mediterranean piece, calling all the musicians home.

Zárate and Tornesaki imbue the tune’s instrumental flights with other-worldly movement, in Spoken Word and vocals, heightening the stakes at a leisurely, melodic pace, pointing out the highlights, as if they’re universal tour guides on the Way Back machine.

“Calling for the Dawn” recalls that heightened energy of past Pérez performances, emphasis on a brutally quickened, impressively delivered percussive flurry by Rantisi — disarming salvo to an opening of worlds in vocal progress (Malek and Sidiq).

More percussive magic, Afro-Cuban in form, gleans the brilliant, triumphant spirit of immigrants making their own imprint, as the first track’s vocal chorus pointedly returns and repeats, “Where are we going? Is it up or down? [Malek],” with another woman’s deeper voice, in another language, threatening the latter, amidst Pérez’s piano-rending stumbling blocks.

“It’s a call to the divine. It’s a warning that if we mess with nature and the environment, then we are responsible for what comes afterward.”

“Muropatía,” based on a folkloric dance from Panama, signals the end of the first suite, in a coalescing of ascending voices, smoke and fire in the strings, Pérez pouncing on moody piano, and the flotsam of a merry, whirlwind melting pot, from here to eternity.

The Panamanian folkloric dance shares a lot in common with Palestinian folkloric rhythms, the pianist discovered, unpacking/melding both in this borderline-chaotic unveiling.

Three-fourths of the way through, a woman begins speaking Spanish above the pleasant singing voices, strings, and piano, abruptly, insistently throwing the entire tune slightly off its axis and threatening to derail the flow altogether.

Her intensifying, confrontational inflections are mirrored dynamically by Pérez’s piano accents, which help tie up that dangling, loose, non-musical thread, somewhat. Perhaps a translation would help, too.

“I want to continue my journey of exploring this pathway of using the power of music to unite and humanize. I want to promote music that acts as a bridge and to inspire younger artists to continue the journey and leave something positive that other generations can draw upon.”

The second half of the album focuses on the emotional impact of immigration, getting into some of the details of what it’s like for many without a safe place to land, without a home, without family and friends, starting over, surviving, wishing, praying for better days.

“Adrift’s” narrative — the pain of an immigrant mother kept from her child for 20 years — doesn’t say enough, lacking a moving melody and the lyrical strength to sustain the message, save for the spare violin pulling at heartstrings, reflecting the aching loneliness of a stranger in a strange land.

Malek’s generic, lofty, rhyme-y-rhyme-y lyrics (“waiting for the time, to leave her life behind, hoping that the earth, will grant her peace of mind…traveling all alone, as far as she can go, searching for the child, she left so long ago…”) seem tailor-made for another epic, Disney movie (see “Mulan” “Moana” “The Little Mermaid”), straining to capture the pathos, while the grandiose words fail her. She reaches too hard and yet not enough to make me feel something, rather than give me a reason to feel.

“Al-Musafir Blues” pairs curvaceous, jaunty, Mandolin-like strings — picked, plucked, strummed, and pounded into submission — with wordless vocals, building up into this silky fusion of Middle-Eastern jazz-honky-tonk-folk…reminiscent of the American movies (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Aladdin”) that liberally dipped into and borrowed from the original, desert source.

The musical ingredients wind their way around and around and up, in a vertical vortex of torrential thoughts and ideas, surrounding the challenges faced by a Palestinian man merely wanting to go to the U.S. to study, but finding himself in limbo at an airport.

“With ‘Al-Musafir Blues,’ I wanted to find a connection and understanding to the blues from another perspective,” Pérez describes. “We need to understand that the blues were created by African Americans – but also that its values and concepts can connect with other cultures. I’m trying to create this musical space where the blues can be the connector in which worldly sounds emerge.”

“Kalesma (True Calling)” works its way into the crux of the matter, a need for people to care more. Again, a woman’s lithesome wordless vocal floats through an undercurrent of piano, laouto’s heavenly strings, and ocean-surging rhythm to embody unconditional, universal love for all humankind.

The final track, “Unknown Destination,” brings Pérez back to the complicated rhythms of a multi-instrumental orchestra that he’s known for — in great, big pauses, stylistic pivots, and the palpable thread of riveting, riotous, heroic humanity, as he commands a blessed reunion of disparate musical and vocal thoughts and prayers from his ruminative, death-defying piano pulpit.

Crisálida may require several replays before getting with the program, especially if you’re a typical fan of Danilo Pérez’s muscular leaps of jazz logic. He incorporates a full, orchestral band and a wide spectrum of vocalists to fully realize an ambitious project of sound, social message, and sweet, musical bliss, somewhere between fusion blues and four-square jazz.

Artist quotes from a DL Media release.