Pan-American jazz Danilo Pérez and Aruán Ortiz transcend their roots BY JON GARELICK

The 38-year-old pianist Danilo Pérez doesn’t have to live in Boston, but here he is. Born in Panama, he studied at Berklee in the ’80s and established a reputation in bands lead by Paquito D’Rivera and Dizzy Gillespie. Working with his contemporary, Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez, he began to change common perceptions of Afro-Latin jazz, or what Pérez prefers to call "jazz with a Latin tinge." In his mid 20s, he was releasing records on a major label.

Like plenty of musicians before him, Pérez could have blown through Berklee on his way to New York and an international career. Instead, he laid down roots. He teaches at Berklee and New England Conservatory, and he and his family live in South Boston. And he’s committed to the Boston scene. Whatever else was going on in his career, you could always find him at local jazz hangs, jamming or just listening, and perpetually bugged by Boston’s cultural inferiority complex, buttonholing journalists and imprecating, "We got to get something happening here, man!" In recent years, despite touring as part of Wayne Shorter’s band, Pérez has still been visible. Last spring, he showed up at a public panel discussion of the Jazz Journalists Association with his infant daughter on one arm. (He and wife Patricia are expecting another child next month.) And earlier this month, he was beaming about a Ryles showcase by the Boston Jazz Collective, which includes several of his students.

What’s also untypical of Pérez, aside from his generosity of spirit, is his artistic growth. When he first appeared on the scene, he was just another phenomenally gifted pianist with great chops. But his writing and his work for groups, despite being rooted in familiar Latin and bebop forms, became increasingly rich with cross-rhythmic complexity. His Panamonk (Impulse, 1996) was a landmark: melding those rootsy dance rhythms with Monk’s jazz-dance abstractions, he didn’t so much turn Monk into Latin jazz as reveal Monk’s Latin tinge.

But in recent years, Pérez has taken another leap. His trio with bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz (which comes to the Regattabar September 21 and 22) is one of the current wonders of the jazz scene. You can still hear that spine of traditional rhythms holding the music together, especially in Pérez’s left-hand tumbaos (the short ostinato figures that define Latin-jazz piano), and in lovely folk-like tunes like "Native Soul." But from there, all bets are off. Pérez, Street, and Cruz have a fluid sense of time and group interplay that’s on a par with the heady three-way conversations of the Brad Mehldau Trio, or those twin influences on the modern piano-trio sound, Bill Evans and Paul Bley.

On their new Live at the Jazz Showcase (available at http://www.daniloperez.com/) you can hear the band at their best, whether in the delicate group improv "Unseen Hands," the wide-ranging improvisation on Stevie Wonder’s "Overjoyed," or the epic "Epilogo," which grows and morphs to a stunning rhythmic climax before the band find a common tumbao that takes them into the fadeout at 9:28.

"It went to about 17 minutes, and there’s more stuff happening toward the end that’s amazing," Pérez tells me over the phone from Southie. What’s most impressive is how he and the band are able to sustain long passages with such freedom, Cruz constantly shifting patterns along with Pérez, Street inventing free propulsive melodic lines that somehow fit and lock in with his partners for the perfect cadences. "We’ve been working for years playing clave (the signature five-beat Afro-Cuban rhythm) in different meters, and we’ve done it so much now that we can play long cycles, almost like ragas, so you don’t really feel ‘here’s the one’ and ‘here’s the two’ — it all feels like one."

Pérez credits his relationships with Shorter and the late soprano-saxophonist Steve Lacy for both sharpening his conception and freeing him. Between Pérez and Lacy, Monk was the connection. But Pérez says he also learned from Lacy about getting into the deep structure of a piece. "Right away, you felt the architecture of his music was very strong, so whatever you were going to put on top — adornments or improvising — you really had to know the material."

And Shorter, he says, has influenced his music in non-musical ways. At Pérez’s audition for the band, Shorter told him that a chord needed "more water." Pérez worked on the chord and brought it back to rehearsal the next day to hear the saxophonist say, "Yeah! That’s good! But the water has to be clean!"

"We were talking about sound versus image," Pérez explains, "and he really knew the clear image he wanted." Shorter, he says, has encouraged his band (with Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade) not to be afraid to struggle on stage. Pérez recalls a concert in Copenhagen where he was very frustrated, struggling, and the sound of a whinnying horse came into his head. "So I just tried to play that — brrrrhh! brrrhhh! — and Wayne turned around immediately and said, ‘That’s the shit!’ "

Another Boston-based pianist who both uses his roots and transcends them is the Cuban-born Aruán Ortiz. Now 32, he grew up in Santiago, the southeastern most corner of the island. Havana, as he explains to me at the Trident bookstore cafe on Newbury Street and at his weekly Wednesday-night gig at Wally’s, is about Miami and the Northern Caribbean; Santiago looks toward Haiti and Africa.

That’s not necessarily what you’ll hear when you put on the new Aruán Ortiz Trio Vol. 1 (Pimienta/Universal). The first tune, Ornette Coleman’s "The Invisible," is played with uncommon elegance in the post-bop manner, replete with traded fours between piano and drums. The chord voicings are rich, the lines tensile and singing. With fellow Cuban Francisco Mela on drums and Bulgarian bassist Peter Slavov, the Ortiz trio has a full ensemble sound that you can trace back to the early trios of Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, and Nat King Cole. At the same time, the tight ensemble passages tend to float and transform with the freedom that characterizes Pérez’s group — again, harking back to Evans and Bley. But Ortiz cites another undersung giant, Andrew Hill, especially his 2000 recording Dusk (Palmetto, 2000). "I used to listen to that album all the time — morning, noon, and night." He found there what he found in Ornette, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis’s ’60s bands: "the bebop language, but they’re trying to use more colors in the band, more interaction."

In Santiago, Ortiz studied viola ("because they told me I had big hands," and because there are always too many violinists). But in Cuba, every music student has to study piano as a second instrument. It wasn’t until he visited Havana and witnessed the stunning virtuosity of the pianists in that city that he decided his second instrument was going to become his first. He studied further in Barcelona, where a casual interest in jazz turned into a passion. He took classes in a school that was part of Berklee’s international network, and that eventually brought him to Boston.

At a Scullers show last month, the band was daunting. The album was recorded in 2003, and by now they’ve become very free with the material. Mela alternated tight patterns, forceful, but never overplaying, and Slavov dug into his bass, free if a bit boomy in the room’s acoustic. Ortiz meanwhile displayed great touch and imagination, whether expanding on the melody of Mela’s chanted theme "Parasuayo" or playing a classically inflected a cappella fantasia.

There are no shows for the Ortiz trio currently scheduled, but you can catch him playing trad-Cuban material every Wednesday night at Wally’s and more jazz-standard fare at that club on Thursdays.

Danilo Pérez Trio | Regattabar, 1 Bennett St, Cambridge | Sept 21-22 | 617.395.7757. Aruán Ortiz | Wally’s, 427 Mass Ave, Boston | Wed + Thurs | 617.424.1408.