Pianist Danilo Perez and saxophonist David Sanchez continue to enchant – Jazz From: chicagotribune.com

Contrary to conventional wisdom, pianist Danilo Perez and saxophonist David Sanchez are not great Latin jazz artists. To confine them to that musical subgenre would be to obscure the breadth of their work.As Perez and Sanchez showed over the weekend before a nearly sold-out Symphony Center, they offer a music that’s informed by Latin America but not defined by it. Perez’s Panamanian roots and Sanchez’s Puerto Rican heritage, in other words, clearly play a role in this music; but it’s overshadowed by the musical rigor of their arguments and their daring in developing them.

So when Perez took the stage alone Friday night, listeners had no idea exactly what to expect—and neither, one suspects, did Perez. He began by tapping a stop-start, fiercely syncopated rhythm on the inside of the instrument, without so much as touching the keyboard. Before long, he was sculpting exquisitely elliptical lines in the upper registers of the piano, punctuating them with pulsing rhythms down low. “*

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