Bio:
From Cuba, Dafnis Prieto's revolutionary drumming techniques and compositions have had a powerful impact on the Latin and Jazz music scene, nationally and internationally.
Various awards include a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship Award; a GRAMMY Award and a Latin GRAMMY Award nomination as Best Latin Jazz Album for Dafnis Prieto Big Band Back to the Sunset in 2018; a GRAMMY Award nomination as Best Latin Jazz Album for Absolute Quintet, and a Latin GRAMMY nomination for "Best New Artist" in 2007; and "Up & Coming Musician of the Year" by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2006. Also a gifted educator, Prieto has conducted numerous master classes, clinics, and workshops throughout the world. He was a faculty member of Jazz Studies at NYU from 2005 to 2014, and in 2015 became a faculty member of Frost School of Music at UM (University of Miami).
As a composer, Prieto has created music for dance, film, chamber ensembles, and most notably for his own bands ranging from duets to big bands, including the distinctively different groups featured by eight acclaimed recordings as a leader: About The Monks, Absolute Quintet, Taking The Soul For a Walk, Si o Si Quartet-Live at Jazz Standard, Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio, Triangles and Circles, Back to the Sunset, and Transparency. He has received new works commissions, grants, and fellowships from Chamber Music America, Princeton University, Jazz at Lincoln Center, East Carolina University, and Meet the Composer.
Prieto has performed at many national and international music festivals as a bandleader presenting his own projects and music, as well as a sideman. Since his arrival to New York in 1999, Prieto has worked in bands led by Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdés, Bebo Valdés, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Eddie Palmieri, Chico and Arturo O'Farrill, Dave Samuels & The Caribbean Jazz Project, Jane Bunnett, D.D. Jackson, Edward Simon, Roy Hargrove, Don Byron, and Andrew Hill, among others.
In 2016 Prieto published the groundbreaking analytical and instructional drum book, A World of Rhythmic Possibilities. In March 2020 he published Rhythmic Synchronicity, a book for non-drummers inspired by a course of the same name that Prieto developed at the Frost School of Music.
Prieto is the founder of the independent music company Dafnison Music. He endorses: Yamaha Drums, Sabian Cymbals, Latin Percussion, Evans Drumheads, and Vic Firth Sticks.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Honors, Grants & Commissions:
GRAMMY Award, Best Latin Jazz Album, Dafnis Prieto Big Band Back to the Sunset, 2019
Latin GRAMMY Nomination, Best Latin Jazz Album, Dafnis Prieto Big Band Back to the Sunset, 2018
National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC) Fund for the Arts Grant, Dafnis Prieto Big Band, 2018
Commissioned by the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, for a new work for the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, 'The Triumphant Journey', 2014
Opening track of the Latin GRAMMY-winning album, Cuba: The Conversation Continues, 2015
MacArthur Fellowship, 2011
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, 2009
Commissioned by WNYC, for a New Work, 2009
Commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, for a new work for the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, 'Song for Chico', 2005
Title track of the GRAMMY-winning album, Song for Chico, 2008
Commissioned by Meet the Composer, Commissioning Music, 2007
Latin GRAMMY Nomination, Best New Artist, 2007
GRAMMY Nomination, Best Latin Jazz Album, Dafnis Prieto Absolute Quintet, 2007
Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award, Up & Coming Musician of the Year, 2006
Commissioned by the Ethos Percussion Group, under auspices of the Jerome Foundation, 'The Guiros Talk', a piece for 4 guiros (1 mov) & 'Claveteando', a piece for 4 sets of percussion (2 mov), 2006
Commissioned by the New Trumpet Consortium, a piece for trumpet & percussion, 'Trail of Memories', 2005
Commissioned by East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) to write a piece, 'Echo Dimensions', for the Meridian Arts Ensemble (Brass Quintet & Percussion), 2005
Meet the Composer Van Lier Fellowship, 2005
Commissioned by The Painted Bride, Philadelphia, 2005
Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Award, 2005
Commissioned by the CBC in Toronto, Canada to write a piece, 'On and On', for the True North Brass Quintet, 2004
Composed music for the GRAMMY-winning album, The Gathering, by The Caribbean Jazz Project, 2002
Music & Dance Collaborations:
Music for 'Taking the Soul for a Walk', Ballet Contemporaneo de Camaguey, Pedro Ruiz, Artistic Director. Performed at: Hunter College, NYC, March 2019; Teatro Avellaneda, Camaguey, Cuba, June 2017 & Teatro Martí, Havana, Cuba, August 2017
Music for the dance work, 'Citizens and Individuals?', Commissioned by Danspace Project, 2005
'Time in Circles', The Joyce Theater, NYC, Spring 2002
'Forms and Sounds', The Jazz Gallery, NYC, 2002
'Puzzle/Rompecabezas', The Kitchen, NYC, Fall 2002
'Sang', Danspace Project, Spring 2002
'A Mouth in a Sleeping Shell', PS 122, NYC, Winter 2000
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).