by Mark Holston

Along the snaky contours of Panama City’s Avenida Central, a thoroughfare and a way of life celebrated by Danilo Pérez on his 1998 Impulse album Central Avenue, Kuna Indian women with gold rings in their noses bargain with Chinese and Hindu shopkeepers as Panamanians of every imaginable hue hustle by. Called the “Crossroads of the World,” Panamá is the very definition of a multi-cultural Mecca -- a land where people from virtually every corner of the planet live and work side-by-side in a harmonious atmosphere that would be envied in most major cities of the world.

It’s not surprising that Pérez, Panama’s most noted musician of his generation, has for the past two decades been generously giving back to the land that nurtured his abundant talents. Today, the Danilo Pérez Foundation has become a leading force in this land of 3.2 million for cultural development and music education. Headed by his wife Patricia and assisted by his parents, the foundation has the stated goal of “offering opportunities for the cultural growth of Panamanian youth of limited resources that have a serious commitment to the study of music” with such specific objectives as discovering and nurturing Panamanian talent, providing the highest standards in music education, and making the country a center for cultural exchange.

The foundation’s flagship project is the annual Panama Jazz Festival, now in its sixth year. Pérez created the event to make possible for Panamanians to experience both the talent and the camaraderie of visiting, world class musicians. “One of the most incredible things that is happening is the involvement of people from throughout the country from all social backgrounds,” he comments. “You’ll see a poor kid from the countryside sitting next to a rich kid from the city at these concerts. That’s what we want.”

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At an August 25 press conference renowned Panamanian pianist and composer Danilo Pérez Jr. announced that the 2009 version of the Panama Jazz Festival will be held January 12 - 17, 2009, with an educational mission expanding again this year and the workshops and auditions moving to Panama Canal Authority facilities in Balboa.

This past January's festival featured four educational institutions, the founding New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music, and added the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a small elite graduate program based at Loyola University in New Orleans, the International Association for Jazz Education and the Conservatorio de Musica de Puerto Rico, all of which played various roles, not all of them seen onstage. Pérez said that the educational institutions participating will be "basically the same as before," and added that Oberlin and Miami University are also expressing interest but that the extent of each institution's participation in a given year is largely a function of the budget that's available for that purpose. Typically some of the institutions send advanced student bands, as the New England Conservatory and the Thelonious Monk Institute did this past January, and those and others also send professors who, along with some of the featured musicians, give workshops and hold auditions. One of the main draws for the jazz festivals is that young musicians from Panama and other Latin American countries are attracted to the workshops and auditions, all of them to improve their musicianship and some in search of scholarships or school admissions that might be won at the auditions.

The workshops have always been mainly oriented toward musicians but the scope of the festival's educational mission expanded early on into recording seminars and last year featured a session on the business of music, for musicians. This year's workshops, to be held January 12 - 16, will again include sessions on the business end of music and will also for the first time include dance workshops and a seminar for the cultural press in musical journalism.