Dafnis Prieto
Latin-Jazz Genius

by Ken Micallef

Unlike most musicians, thirty-three-year-old Dafnis Prieto practices the axiom “early to bed, early to rise, makes a [musician] healthy, wealthy, and wise.” While he may still be working on the “wealthy” part, Dafnis Prieto certainly adheres to the spirit of founding father Ben Franklin’s advice, and in eight rather short years has created a career rife with possibilities.

    Far from the jazz stereotype of the scuffling musician prowling New York’s late-night clubs, only to return to his bed at dawn, Dafnis Prieto typically turns in early so that the deep musical concepts filling his fertile mind will have full release come the new day. Dafnis wastes not a moment, as anyone who has witnessed him speaking or singing melodic and rhythmic ideas into his ubiquitous MP3 recorder can attest.

    When not touring the world with Santo Domingan pianist extraordinaire Michel Camilo or with one of his own groups, Dafnis typically rises at 7:30 A.M., hits the streets of his Washington Heights, New York neighborhood to retrieve his family’s chocolate, hummus, and toast breakfast from a local bodega, then gets down to work. After some stretching and a light yoga routine, Dafnis might work out Stick Control variations on a pad, revisit the previous day’s composition-in-progress on an upright piano, and then, after they’ve woken up, he’ll touch base with his family of musicians stretching across the globe.

    Somehow finding time to write and record three albums as a leader since 2003, Dafnis has also composed entire suites for various commissions, performed and recorded as a sideman with musicians as diverse as Henry Threadgill, Bebo de Cuba, and The Caribbean Jazz Project, supported his wife’s modern dance troupe, and recorded and toured with Michel Camilo’s Trio, the gig that helped launch the careers of such greats as Dave Weckl, Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez, Cliff Almond, Joel Rosenblatt, and Zach Danziger.

    As if that weren’t enough, when he’s not on the road, Dafnis also teaches ensembles and private students at Manhattan’s New York University. No doubt, it’s a full plate for this diminutive human dynamo.

    Dafnis’s exceptional energy, fire, and ambition can be heard on his Sextet’s brilliant new album, Taking The Soul For A Walk. As with the title of his first album, About The Monks, Prieto’s latest grabs your attention even before you play it. Dafnis is a thinker, a drummer/philosopher, a musician as interested in modern dance and Béla Bartók as Tony Williams’ flam flurries or displacing songos to the point where “1” is practically abolished.

    Dafnis insists that he’s trying to advance Cuban tradition, not repeat it, and the songs of Taking The Soul For A Walk challenge anyone, or any drummer, who believes a premeditated arsenal of songo/clave/samba rhythms adds up to Latin mastery. Prieto almost never plays a stock Cuban rhythm (he’s a native of Santa Clara, Cuba), making deconstruction of his style a difficult task.

     Dafnis’s new songs—“Taking The Soul For A Walk,” “Commandante,” and “Just Say It,” to name a few—turn standard Latin conventions on their ear. What sounds like songo, clave, or cascara rhythms may actually be stylized rhythms created on the fly to match the composition, or the result of the drummer’s meditation on the nature of passing clouds, the limbs of a tree, or a speeding automobile. Within his philosophical compass, Dafnis plays with extreme fire, aggression, and passion—just don’t call it machismo!

    Instructed in Russian conservatory technique, yet grounded in the hand drumming of his tough Santa Clara neighborhood, Dafnis brings scholarly wisdom and innate ability to bear in blazing single-stroke rolls, incomprehensible full-set combinations, and enough witty solos to set an entire Macanudo factory ablaze.

    Modern Drummer readers—and everyone else—can witness Dafnis’s fabulous flow at this year’s MD Festival Weekend, to be held at The Performing Arts Center at Purchase College, Purchase, New York in September. In the meantime, check out Taking The Soul For A Walk. It’s by turns thoughtful, incendiary, aggressive, and peaceful. Like Prieto himself, his music expresses the full range of emotions—the mark of a mature musician reflecting, as he says, “the way I live now.”

MD: When time allows, what you do practice?

Dafnis: I practice coordination. At this point, practice is about getting to the point where anything I can think of, I can play on the drums. I work on that relationship between my brain and my limbs.

    I do that in different ways. I can bring something like a 6/8 pattern to the set. I’ll develop different independence ideas based on it, or I might go in slow motion around the drums to feel it with my body and try to make the movement and the sound as fluid as possible. That is the ultimate point of practicing for me. That specific point where you’re able to reproduce everything you have in your mind.

MD: What does slow-motion practice enable?

Dafnis: It gives me more time to think about it and to breathe.

MD: Do you like to warm up before gigs?

Dafnis: I like to play the drums before a gig as much as I can. It’s a different touch when you practice on a pad. I try to stick with the same sensation as much as I can before I play. I warm up and try to stretch my muscles. I might run through some Stick Control exercises or rudiments. I work on my weakness.

MD: What is your weakness?

Dafnis: I have many! One of my biggest challenges is to match the left hand with my right. I try to get to that place where the left hand feels good compared to the right hand in the sense of speed, accents, motion, and flexibility.

MD: You play brief but very dynamic solos. Are there some consistent ideas you like to use as springboards into a solo?

Dafnis: It changes all of the time. It really depends how I feel. You always have things in the back of your mind, things that you do that become your signature. For instance, let’s say I’m playing an aggressive solo in a Latin groove. I’ll try to develop some kind of timbale sound within it and make a variation of that, a contrast between that and the regular sound of the drumset. But it’s really all about being in the moment, and what’s happening onstage between the players you’re working with.

Read the rest of the interview with Dafnis Prieto in the August issue of Modern Drummer, on sale now.

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