Paquito D’Rivera Quintet at Miner Auditorium

Paquito D'Rivera Quintet
Miner Auditorium
San Francisco, CA
September 26, 2025

On Friday night at SFJAZZ's Miner Auditorium, Paquito D'Rivera walked out smiling, a clarinet at his side and seven decades of stagecraft in his pocket. The Cuban-born NEA Jazz Master had long argued that the hallway between the conservatory and the clavé was not a border but a corridor of constant traffic. With his longrunning quintet—Alex Brown (piano), Oscar Stagnaro (six-string electric bass), Mark Walker (drums), and Diego Urcola (flugelhorn and trumpet)—he made that argument feel inevitable, even obvious, for a packed house.

The thesis came early with "Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu (Bogotá)." Brown, Stagnaro, and Walker set a nimble chassis that let the famous melody travel on new wheels. D'Rivera, switching horns midstream, delivered the tune as if it had always contained a backbeat in its shadow. He joked about forcing his pianist to play in C "because that was the original version," then folded the joke back into the music; the line kept its Polish vowels while the rhythm learned to speak Spanish. When he quipped that Chopin hailed from the "Caribbean side of Poland," the room laughed because it had just heard the truth of the gag.

D'Rivera's humor worked like a chalkboard sketch between solos. He told the crowd that he no longer watched TV because it brought only "bad news," then invited everyone to sing a simple melody together—an instant demonstration that shared rhythm was a more reliable civic project than shared headlines. He teased that Wynton Marsalis had "proven" Mozart was born in New Orleans and then proceeded to make the claim musically: the Adagio from the Clarinet Concerto slipped, mid-performance, into a New Orleans blues. The audience's response was immediate and loud, because the stylistic hinge was not a stunt; it revealed an affinity that had been hiding in plain sight.

The band's cohesion gave those jokes their bite. Brown has worked alongside D'Rivera for years, and it showed: his left hand hinted at montuno patterns even as his right threaded countermelodies through the leader's lines. Stagnaro's grounded, mercurial electric bass drew the dance step out of whatever time Walker proposed—danzón insinuation one minute, modern ride cymbal chatter the next. Urcola toggled between the centered warmth of flugelhorn and the bright flare of trumpet, coloring a chorus like a commentator who knew when to underline and when to argue. Longevity might have been D'Rivera's most effective arranging tool; these musicians finished one another's sentences without stepping on the punchlines.

That continuity shaped the program. Duke Ellington's "Medium," freshly arranged by the young Cuban pianist Camila Cortina, arrived with a lesson attached. D'Rivera relayed Ellington's maxim—good arranging was recomposing; bad arranging was decomposing—then demonstrated it. The quintet treated the chart as a launching pad, not a relic in a glass case. Brown and Walker found airy pockets after the melody, and the leader's alto skated across them with a lightness that suggested how easily Ellington's lines absorbed a Caribbean sway while remaining eloquently American.

The leader's own timeline shadowed the night. He was celebrating "70 big ones" on stage, he told us, and he revisited "Tú Mi Delirio," a melody he first played as a child and later recast on his 1996 album Portraits Of Cuba (Chesky Records). The tune carried the tenderness of a keepsake with the musculature of a modern rhythm section. That juxtaposition—memory charged by motion—also defined "La Fleur de Cayenne." After sharing that his 2025 album of the same name earned another Latin Grammy nomination, he dedicated the joropo-driven piece to Venezuela. The sentiment landed because the rhythm did; diplomacy was enacted on the bandstand rather than explained from it.

If D'Rivera was the show's narrator, he was generous with the chapters he delegated. "Libertango" ceded space to Urcola's muted trumpet feature, and the band followed with two of Urcola's pieces, "The Natural" and "Buenos Aires." Instead of a leader-plus-sidemen template, the set felt like a well-read roundtable. Stagnaro often brokered the discussion, his lines tugging the pulse toward the dance floor while Walker layered cross rhythms overhead; Urcola responded with phrases that balanced burn and ballast. The effect was not fireworks for their own sake; it was craft in motion, the kind that invited rather than bludgeoned. The quotations that D'Rivera tucked into solos—"Salt Peanuts" among them—functioned as street signs connecting neighborhoods. Each sign pointed back to the Afro-Atlantic thoroughfare he had traveled for most of his life, from childhood studies in Havana to the crucible of Irakere and the cosmopolitan bands of Dizzy Gillespie. Hearing those fragments pop up in a contemporary setlist—Chopin to Mozart to Ellington to Piazzolla—clarified the evening's story: repertoire migrated, and when it migrated, it evolved. This was not fusion in the tired sense of incompatible parts welded together; it was the recognition that these parts grew from related roots and still recognized one another when they met.

Even the cameo underlined the point. D'Rivera beckoned percussionist Takafumi Nikaido from the audience—"Taka," as the band called him—and handed him a pandereta for a spontaneous workout. "We have never played this before," D'Rivera warned, "and maybe we will never play it again." The line read as a dare and as policy. Shared rhythmic sense, not rehearsal time, would be the credential. It worked because the quintet listened as carefully as it played; the groove cohered almost instantly, proof that a familiar beat could welcome new voices without ceremony.

D'Rivera's stage patter often circled back to gratitude—toward San Francisco ("What a beautiful city you have"), toward pianists he had loved ("Maybe that was why I never learned to play the piano"), toward mentors and peers. The encore, Pepe Rivero's catchy "Pa' Bevo," honored one of those peers in absentia and condensed the evening's method: a witty theme, a sturdy groove, and a band that knew how to pass the conversation around the horn until the whole room understood. The crowd was already on its feet from the closer; by the time the final notes of the encore hit, people were dancing in the aisles and clapping in time. The musicians bowed as a unit, the leader waved, and a few last chuckles rippled out from the stage—the teacher dismissing the class with a smile.

What lingered was not just virtuosity, though there was plenty, or even the crowd-pleasing humor, of which there was more. It was the way D'Rivera placed technique and charm in the service of history. He did not mash styles together; he revealed how they had been conversing all along. Brown's lyric touch nodded toward Ravel and Eddie Palmieri without apology; Walker slipped from second-line shuffle to modern small-group chatter like a bilingual speaker switching languages mid-sentence. Stagnaro's tumbao sat comfortably inside Chopin's outline because the groove belonged anywhere it could breathe. The concert's deeper meaning was plain: the canon was not a shrine; it was a repertoire designed for movement.

D'Rivera's honors—Grammys in jazz and classical, the NEA medal—mattered here only because they certified his license to keep making that case in front of big audiences. He was not merely a survivor of the late twentieth-century Latin jazz explosion; he was one of its most persuasive historians and translators, and he was still writing the glossary in real time. In San Francisco, he demonstrated that a Chopin melody could incorporate a rumba step, that a Mozart slow movement could convey the blues, and that a roomful of strangers could sing together without fear of being wrong. That was not an act of nostalgia; it was a ritual of renewal.

The forward gaze was built into his method. He joked about staying in the Bay Area because "you waited too long to call me," then promptly handed the spotlight to a younger arranger, such as Camila Cortina, or to a longtime partner, like Urcola. The message was that this conversation would outlive any one teller. If Miner Auditorium was any indication, D'Rivera's next chapter would continue to prove that the most enduring borders in music were the ones that vanished when a band listened hard, a melody kept moving, and a tradition remembered why it loved to dance.

Setlist: "Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu (Bogotá)," "La Fleur de Cayenne," "Medium," "Tú Mi Delirio," "Mozart Clarinet Concerto, 2nd Movement," "Concina," "Libertango," "The Natural," "Buenos Aires" Encore: "Pa Bevo"

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