Time Magazine's top ten pianists of the past year -- thrilled a City Hall full of Bermuda's jazz aficionados on Friday night. With his sidemen, the very young 'Nuyoriqueno' bassist Carlos Henriquez and master drummer Antonio 'Doctore' Sanchez, he treated music lovers to a memorable concert.

He began by playing the two tunes on the melodica, `Blues for the Saints' and `Blues for Panama', before moving to the piano. The effect was as bracing as a dive into a pool on a summer's day.

Perez has an immaculate technique which he puts at the service of originality of improvisation. (He is in his day job a professor of Piano and Improvisation.) He clearly practices what he teaches -- his approach was refreshingly free of cliches, that bane of mediocrity. He allowed the audience to see and hear him float musical ideas, his sidemen in attendance, while he pursued their musical implications and possibilities with mathematical thoroughness. If he has a noticeable influence perhaps it is Keith Jarrett, but there is no mistaking this Panamanian's originality. His touch is light and clean. If anything his dynamic range -- his softest pianos and his loudest fortes -- could use extending. Also, as was said of the young Marsalis, maybe he needs to lose everything he has in order to find something emotional to say.

Whatever the case he seems a more cerebral and rhythmic pianist than a poet, though when the group played Thelonius Monk's `Reflections' he showed that he has perfect mastery of the ballad, especially as a vehicle for emotional inwardness.

In the second set he offered, solo, an `Impromptu'. This form was a favourite of the Romantic pianists, especially Chopin. In Perez's hands it became a beautiful uniting of his cultural inheritance, African Spanish, and Indian.

The series of improvisations on the theme he chose played with Bachian figures and Latin dance rhythms; shear ebullience and fecundity of musical invention.

The group displayed a high degree of cohesiveness, moving from the freest forms of improvisation to transitions and endings of immaculate execution so that one was hardly sure what was rehearsed and what was not. It was all good.

For example, the group transformed Monk'd `Think of One' so thoroughly none but a few will have recognised it. I certainly didn't. What mattered was the beauty of what the group made of the original material. That, everyone will have recognised and enjoyed.

I don't want to give the impression the evening was all cerebral. Far from it.

The audience was carried along by some dazzling virtuoso play by the bassist and the drummer. I reckon that local drummers will soon start sporting a cowbell foot pedal! Even at their most abandoned though, there was none of the excesses that often mar jazz performances.

An engaging aspect of the performance was Perez's informality and interaction with his audience. It was a sort of halfway house between a club and a concert setting, and the audience seemed to enjoy this relaxed atmosphere.

This was Charles Bascombe's such evening of Jazz, for which he ought to be commended. The programme was under the patronage of Mr. and Mrs. Roderick Pearman.

Earlier, Sondra Choudray began the show dressed in a black sequined dress, looking lithe and supple. She pleased the crowd with her selection and rendering of such standards as `You're Gonna Hear From Me', `Funny Valentine', and `This Is The Moment'. Her accompanist Vic Glazier seemed to sleepwalk noisily through his duties ,except for a more sensitive treatment of his composition `Born To Be With You'.

Ms Choudray will appear soon in BMDS's `Hot Mikado' and on Vic Glazier's up-coming CD, with other Bermudian songstresses.

RON LIGHTBOURNE ENTERTAINMENT ENTERTAINER ENT REVIEW REV