Meet the Author—Jazz Sensation Paquito D’Rivera
From Washington Post:
“One musician who embodies Nicholson’s theory of “globalization” is Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban-born saxophone and clarinet virtuoso who plays classical music, jazz and Latin dance music with equal skill. A professional musician since the age of 6, D’Rivera has also written a novel, and in My Sax Life (Northwestern Univ., $29.95) he’s produced a breathless, sometimes vulgar romp through his life, both before and after his exile from Cuba.
A staunch opponent of Fidel Castro, D’Rivera has no patience for anyone who admires anything about Cuba under communism — and that includes Nelson Mandela and Gabriel García Márquez. He dramatically describes his 1980 escape, when he sought asylum in Spain and left his wife and son behind. (They were later reunited, but the marriage didn’t survive.) D’Rivera recites endless lists of sidemen and recording dates,
but he reveals little of his own musical approach, except to praise Brazilian music as “the most balanced formula of rhythm-melody-harmony in the world” and to mock Cuban trumpeters for “playing high-pitched notes that only dogs can hear.”Paquito’s autobiography “My Sax Life”is available from Northwestern University Press.
