Bach, Bebop & Bay Area: Paquito D'Rivera’s Jazz Odyssey

Paquito D'Rivera arrived in San Francisco for an upcoming concert at SFJAZZ with a mission and a grin—one that views borders as mere suggestions. Two nights on the Miner Auditorium stage with his seasoned quintet will celebrate years of practice and spontaneous creativity, tracing a career that started with prodigy recitals in Havana and has spanned orchestras, big bands, and clubs worldwide.

This interview, conducted before the concerts, revolved around Jazz Meets the Classics (Paquito Records/Sunnyside Records), a live album released in 2014, but mentioning that record years after its release highlights clarity over nostalgia: it offers the clearest view into how D'Rivera thinks, arranges, and leads.

"The idea was mixing several European composers with some from the New World," D'Rivera said, and he put the emphasis where it belongs: on pleasure. "It's just music. Just because you're a jazz musician doesn't mean you're forbidden to enjoy Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky! It's just that we play it differently—maybe more rhythmically." He traces the impulse back to his father, a classical saxophonist who brought the French school to Cuba and stocked the house with records that ignored categories. "I grew up listening to all kinds of music... it was just another kind of music."

Asked how the logic works, D'Rivera answered by jumping centuries with a smile. "Some European composers are a little more swinging than others," he mused—Chopin, for one. "And not to mention Bach. Dizzy Gillespie told me that Bach was the first bebopper, and he was not too far from reality." When pressed, he sketched a Charlie Parkerish line over a Bach phrase and shrugged at the neat fit: "The language that Bach was using... had a lot to do with the bebop language. Jazz is something impossible to describe, but very easy to recognize. You must listen to both, and for some reason, you immediately feel it."

The 2014 album explains why it remains so relevant to discuss now. Jazz Meets the Classics was recorded live at Dizzy's Club in New York with D'Rivera's working band: D'Rivera on clarinet and alto; Diego Urcola on trumpet and valve trombone; Alex Brown on piano; Oscar Stagnaro on electric bass; Mark Walker on drums. "We have some of them who have been with me for more than 30 years," he said, introducing the lineup as if they were old friends. Longevity matters. "It's always about improvisation. You never know what to expect... You never know what's going to happen."

The Chopin thread is a doorway into the band's method, not a setlist carved in stone. D'Rivera loves to tell the story of Hilario Duran's arrangement of "Fantaisie-Impromptu," first heard for big band and later refit for quintet. "I fell in love with that arrangement," he recalled. "And many years later, I asked Hilario, 'Will you repeat that arrangement for my quintet?' He did it. I said, 'It's wonderful!'" Then comes the bandstand aside, delivered with comic timing: "It's tough technically... I transcribed it to the key of C, and it is the first time in my life I saw a musician protesting for having to play in C."

What begins as homage becomes a tour of the Afro-Atlantic. "After Hilario wrote this wonderful arrangement, on the same idea you can create many, many things because it is mixed with samba and with Cuban rumba at the end," D'Rivera says. "In the beginning, you feel that Chopin was born in Rio de Janeiro, and then at the end, you feel that Chopin grew up in Havana." The line is a laugh, but it's also a thesis: classical melody as seed, Afro-Latin rhythm as soil, improvisation as weather.

The "E minor Prelude" offers a second example of the principle: start with a melody whose harmony invites invention, then let the group conversation find its own contour. "That E minor Prelude is so inspiring to improvise on top of those beautiful chord changes," he said. "Sometimes we try to do an arrangement, but it doesn't go the way we expected... we end up improvising in the middle of something that isn't supposed to be there. It might sound like a mistake, but that's also part of the idea." This is why the 2014 record is relevant to SFJAZZ in 2025: it documents the language the band speaks, not a museum piece the band re-creates.

If you're searching for the canon beyond Chopin, it's there in D'Rivera's stories and in the band's vocabulary. Beethoven can be reframed as a Latin waltz; Mozart's clarinet writing can pick up a gospel inflection; a sprint through "The Magic Flute" can turn into "Die Zauberklarinete." He is not pledging to play any one of those pieces on any given night. He's describing the grammar the quintet uses to make the case that bebop and the Baroque (and the street, and the conservatory) share a logic—one that becomes clearest when you hear it happen live.

That live feel comes from relationships as much as repertoire. "We have some of them who have been with me for more than 30 years," D'Rivera repeats, and the repetition is telling. The band trusts one another's choices: Urcola can flip between trumpet bite and the rounder grain of valve trombone without breaking the line. Brown can move from a tight, contrapuntal figure to a tumbling montuno. Stagnaro's electric bass can sit right on top of Walker's drum chatter or anchor the groove from beneath it. "It's always about improvisation," D'Rivera said. "Improvised music is always a surprise."

His ease with all of this is not borrowed; it is lived experience. He was set on his path by his father—"a classic saxophonist... the person who imported the French school of saxophone from the Paris Conservatory," as he puts it—and began public performance at seven. He matured into one of the rare artists to win Grammys and Latin Grammys in both classical and jazz categories, with a résumé that includes the explosive cross-currents of Irakere, the cosmopolitan sweep of Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra, and original works for chamber ensembles and symphony halls. He wears the laurels lightly, but they matter: Guggenheim Fellow, multiple awards, and the distinction that frames this SFJAZZ visit—2005 NEA Jazz Master.

Ask him about rooms, and he doesn't deliver a manifesto—just a working musician's sense of fit that explains why the Miner stage appeals. "Every auditorium has a different feeling," he says. "The interaction in small clubs is more personal or intimate... but it's nothing like the feeling of the sound in a big auditorium. It's totally different. It's the difference between a string quartet and a symphony orchestra... or like a jazz quintet and a big band. Both are beautiful. It's just different." Miner Auditorium gives him the best of both: clarity for counterpoint, space for the rhythm section to bloom.

So, what can Bay Area audiences look forward to? Not a facsimile of a 2014 track list, but the sensibility that made that album sing. Expect a range that mirrors his career:

Though D'Rivera is happy to make the case with words; he prefers to make it on the bandstand. The 2014 album remains a helpful guide to how the quintet thinks and plays —why Bach can feel like a bebop cousin, why Chopin can dance in a baião, why a "mistake" is sometimes the door you were looking for, but performing the music live more than a decade later is the point of the exercise.

This is where a bebop burner tips its hat to Parker's coat-hanger lines; a danzón or rumba pulse converses with European counterpoint; a lyric clarinet line cracks open into gospel-tinged call-and-response; a new chart pivots from samba to swing without apology. This is where the argument breathes, where the old friendships sharpen the turns, where a melody you thought you knew goes out for a walk and comes back grinning. This is what happens when a band listens hard and takes chances. "Be ready because you never know," D'Rivera said with a laugh. "You never know what's going to happen."

D'Rivera has spent seven decades insisting that the canon and the clavé can share a table. He no longer needs to prove it; he enjoys the conversation. In performance, recognition will arrive the usual way: suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, when a Baroque figure slips into a tumbao and a room full of people hears the same heartbeat.

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