Nine-time Grammy nominee Danilo Pérez is bringing his piano and his passport to the border region this week, undertaking a four-day residency that will have him rehearsing, teaching and performing on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana line as the centerpiece of this year's San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival. The festival runs October 1 through October 4, spreading across Quartyard in San Diego's East Village, Avenida Revolución in Tijuana and the California Center for the Arts in Escondido.
Pérez, a pianist, composer, educator and bandleader whom The San Diego Union-Tribune describes as at home in any musical setting, will spend the residency workshopping and rehearsing with student ensembles on both sides of the border. He'll perform Saturday, October 3, at 3:30 p.m. in Escondido alongside the SDSU Jazz Ensembles, then cross back into Tijuana for a Sunday, October 4, 2 p.m. set with the SDSU program's new partner, La Covacha Big Band. The two bands will work through material from Pérez's 2024 album *Lumen*, a collaboration with Sweden's Bohuslän Big Band that earned Pérez his ninth career Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 68th Grammy Awards, according to Grateful Web. He also plans to bring in selections from his 1996 album *Panamonk*, per the Union-Tribune.
A Third Anniversary Built on Free Access
This is the festival's third year, and co-founders Daniel Atkinson and Julián Plascencia have used it to lean harder into free programming. Admission is free Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and for Saturday's outdoor performances, with Saturday's indoor all-day passes running $54 to $90 and a $125 Friends of the Festival option that includes a hosted dinner led by chef Juan González. More than 4,500 attended last fall, and the festival is expanding for the first time from three days to four.
That growth has been underwritten in large part by Qualcomm co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs, who seeded the festival's 2024 launch with nearly $400,000 and pledged three years of financial support. The festival offers free admission to three of its four concerts. The festival has also drawn backing from Secretaria de Cultura, the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, oneSD, the Museum of Us and MiresBall, per the Union-Tribune's reporting.
Two Co-Founders, Two Cities' Worth of Jazz History
Atkinson and Plascencia each bring decades of presenting experience to the project. Atkinson previously served as Director of Arts, Humanities, and Languages at UC San Diego Extension and founded the long-running Athenaeum Jazz concert series in La Jolla in 1989, a venue DownBeat magazine has ranked among the world's top jazz rooms, according to the BMI Foundation. Plascencia, president of Promotora de Cultura de Baja California, created the Tijuana Jazz & Blues Festival in 2010 specifically to help restore tourism and family gatherings on Avenida Revolución after a wave of regional violence, as reported by Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias.
Atkinson said the four-day residency will bring Pérez directly into the binational region, per the Union-Tribune, and Ensenada trumpeter Iván Trujillo called the residency a historic initiative for the jazz scene in Baja California.
Shared Roots With the Panama Jazz Festival
Pérez, who serves as artistic director of the annual Panama Jazz Festival he co-founded with Patricia Zárate in 2003, said the San Diego-Tijuana event showcases music as a vehicle for diplomacy, per the Union-Tribune. The Panama festival drew more than 40,000 attendees in 2025 and has become a major tourist draw and point of civic pride, and the two festivals share a similar formula of diverse artists, free outdoor concerts, ticketed indoor shows and educational programming, including the free master classes Panama offers through leading institutions.
Pérez was born in Panama City and started playing piano at age 3, enrolling in the country's national conservatory at age 10 before a Fulbright scholarship brought him to Indiana University and a Quincy Jones scholarship followed. He joined Dizzy Gillespie's all-star United Nations Orchestra in 1989 and has since performed with Lee Konitz, Clark Terry, Jon Hendricks, Joe Lovano and Paquito D'Rivera. He is founder and artistic director of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute at Berklee College of Music, serves as cultural ambassador to the Republic of Panama, and holds the title of UNESCO Artist for Peace.
Headliners Linked by the Wayne Shorter Quartet
Pérez shares Saturday's Escondido bill with Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band and the seven-piece Mingus Dynasty, which will perform selections from Charles Mingus's 1957 album *Tijuana Moods* — a record Mingus wrote after finding artistic inspiration on trips to Tijuana, according to the California Center for the Arts. Pérez and Blade were both longtime members of Wayne Shorter's quartet, which won the 2019 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for *Emanon*, per the International Music Network. The Escondido dinner tied to that Saturday program is being catered by Mesa Agrícola, the restaurant that just landed on The New York Times' 50 Best Restaurants in America list, as Hoodline reported in its piece on the NYT honor.
Thursday's opening night at Quartyard pairs Jungle Fire and Tijuana ensemble Colectivo Fronterizo with the Binational Youth Ensemble at 5 p.m. Colectivo Fronterizo also collaborated with Ensenada-born feminist rapper and sociologist Fémina Fatal for the group's U.S. debut, a project blending original jazz composition with norteña freestyle verses, according to the festival's own lineup pages. Friday's Tijuana bill at 5 p.m. brings back Colectivo Fronterizo alongside Señales Selañes and Charlie Chávez y Su Afrotruko.
Vocalist Lucía, who will perform twice at this year's festival with her father Ramón Gutiérrez and Familia Gutiérrez in a Son Jarocho program rooted in Afro-Mexican tradition from Veracruz, said Pérez is one of her biggest musical inspirations, per the Union-Tribune. Lucía became the first Mexican artist to win the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2022. Longtime San Diego saxophonist James Moody, who moved to the city in 1989 and died in 2010, is remembered as part of the same regional jazz lineage the festival continues to draw on, according to the paper's reporting.
