On Friday night at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, Paquito D’Rivera walked out smiling, a clarinet at his side and seven decades of stage experience in his pocket. The Cuban-born NEA Jazz Master has long argued that the corridor between the conservatory and the clave is not a border but a passage of constant traffic. With his long-running quintet—Alex Brown (piano), Oscar Stagnaro (six-string electric bass), Mark Walker (drums), and Diego Urcola (flugelhorn and trumpet)—he made that point seem inevitable, even obvious, for a packed house in San Francisco.

The thesis arrived early with “Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu (Bogotá).” Brown, Stagnaro, and Walker crafted a flexible framework that let the famous melody ride on fresh wheels. D’Rivera, switching horns midstream, rendered the tune as if it had always carried a backbeat in its shadow. He joked about forcing his pianist to play in C “because that’s the original version,” then blended 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 functions like a chalkboard sketch between solos. He told the crowd he doesn’t watch TV anymore because it brings only “bad news,” then invited everyone to sing a simple melody together—an immediate demonstration that shared rhythm is a more reliable civic project than shared headlines. He joked 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 quick and loud because the stylistic shift wasn’t a stunt; it revealed an affinity that had been hiding in plain sight.

The band’s cohesion gives those jokes their sharp edge. Brown has worked with D’Rivera for years, and it shows: his left hand hints at montuno patterns even as his right weaves counter-melodies through the leader’s lines. Stagnaro’s grounded, unpredictable electric bass pulls the dance steps out of whatever time Walker suggests—danzón hints one minute, modern ride-cymbal chatter the next. Urcola switches between the warm centered tone of flugelhorn and the bright flare of trumpet, coloring a chorus like a commentator who knows when to emphasize and when to challenge. Longevity might be D’Rivera’s most powerful arranging tool; these musicians finish each other’s sentences without stepping on the punchlines.

That sense of 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 is reworking; bad arranging is breaking down—then demonstrated it. The quintet treated the chart as a launchpad, not a museum piece. Brown and Walker found airy spots after the melody, and the leader’s alto floated across them with a lightness that showed how easily Ellington’s lines absorb a Caribbean swing while remaining eloquently American.

The leader’s own timeline shadowed the night. He’s 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 included on his 1996 album *Portraits of Cuba* (Chesky Records). The tune carried the tenderness of a keepsake with the strength 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 resonated because the rhythm did; diplomacy was enacted on the bandstand rather than explained from it.

If D’Rivera is the show’s narrator, he’s generous with the chapters he assigns. “Libertango” gave way to Urcola’s muted trumpet feature, and the band followed with two of Urcola’s compositions, “The Natural” and “Buenos Aires.” Instead of a leader-plus-sidemen format, the set felt like a well-informed roundtable. Stagnaro often guided the discussion, his lines pulling the rhythm toward the dance floor while Walker intertwined cross-rhythms overhead; Urcola responded with phrases that balanced energy and restraint. The effect wasn’t fireworks for their own sake; it was craft in motion, the kind that invites rather than overwhelms.

The quotations that D’Rivera integrated into his solos—like “Salt Peanuts”—serve as street signs connecting different neighborhoods. Each sign points back to the Afro-Atlantic road he has traveled for much of his life, from childhood studies in Havana to the melting pot of Irakere and the cosmopolitan bands of Dizzy Gillespie. Hearing those fragments reappear in a modern setlist—ranging from Chopin to Mozart to Ellington to Piazzolla—illuminates the evening’s story: repertoire moves, and when it moves, it learns. This isn't fusion in the tired sense of incompatible parts welded together; it’s the acknowledgment that these parts share common roots and continue to recognize each other when they meet.

Even the cameo emphasized the point. D’Rivera called up percussionist Takafumi Nikaido from the audience—“Taka,” as the band calls him—and handed him a pandereta for a spontaneous jam. “We’ve never played this before,” D’Rivera warned, “and maybe we’ll never play it again.” The line served as both a challenge and a rule. Shared rhythmic understanding, not rehearsal time, was the credential. It worked because the quintet listens as intently as it plays; the groove came together almost instantly, proving that a shared beat can embrace new voices without ceremony.

D’Rivera’s stage banter often returns to themes of gratitude—toward San Francisco (“What a beautiful city you have”), toward pianists he’s admired (“Maybe that’s why I never learned to play the piano”), and toward mentors and peers. The encore, Pepe Rivero’s catchy “Pa’ Bevo,” paid tribute to one of those peers who was absent and distilled the evening’s message: a clever theme, a solid groove, and a band that knows how to pass the conversation around the horn until everyone understands. The crowd was already on its feet after the final piece; by the time the encore’s last notes played, people were dancing in the aisles and clapping along. The musicians bowed together, the leader waved, and a few last chuckles spread across the stage—teacher dismissing the class with a smile.

What lingered wasn’t 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 doesn’t mash styles together; he reveals how they’ve 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 belongs anywhere it can breathe. The concert’s more profound meaning was plain: the canon isn’t a shrine; it’s a repertoire designed for movement.

D’Rivera’s awards—Grammy wins in jazz and classical, the NEA medal—are significant mainly because they confirm his right to continue making his case before large audiences. He is not just a survivor of the late-20th-century Latin-jazz boom; he is one of its most convincing historians and interpreters, still defining the language as he goes. In San Francisco, he demonstrated that a Chopin melody can incorporate a rumba rhythm, that a Mozart slow movement can express the blues, and that a room full of strangers can sing together without fear of making mistakes. That’s not an act of nostalgia; it’s a celebration of renewal.

The forward gaze is integral to his approach. He jokes about staying in the Bay Area because “you waited too long to call me,” then quickly shifts the spotlight to a younger arranger like Camila Cortina or a longtime partner like Urcola. The message is that this conversation will outlast any single storyteller. If Miner Auditorium is any clue, D’Rivera’s next chapter will continue to show that the most lasting borders in music are the ones that disappear when a band listens intently, a melody keeps going, and a tradition remembers why it loves 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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