Cuban-born, New York-resident drummer-composer Dafnis Prieto has been named a 2011 MacArthur fellow, an honor attended by $500,000 to do with as he pleases, doled out $100K a year for five years.
Congratulations to Dafnis — who’s only been in the U.S. since 1999, when at age 25 he emigrated and joined reedist-composer Henry Threadgill’s ensemble. See what he does as a soloist and bandleader in Youtube clips.Â
Other jazz-oriented MacArthur fellows of the past five years are violinist Regina Carter, pianist Jason Moran, alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon and alto saxophonist-composer-record company principal John Zorn, all of whom have used the funds for personal yet well-received projects of the sort that require support beyond what the consumer music market provides.
The fellowships were established in 1981, and first recognized jazz-oriented musicians in ’88, when both pianist Ran Blake and drummer Max Roach were honored. Subsequent support of musicians of vernacular traditions has been irregular, but George Russell, Cecil Taylor, Steven Feld, Ali Akbar Khan, Steve Lacy, Ornette Coleman, Meredith Monk, Trimpin, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Ken Vandermark, Bright Sheng, George E. Lewis, Reginald Robinson, Edgar Meyer and Jonathan Lethem are recipients, and I admire all of them.
Multi-disciplinary across the arts and sciences, MacArthur Awards are unusual not least of all for the large cash grant going directly to recipients rather than being filtered through layers of bureaucratic organization. You can’t apply for it, very few are ever going to get it, but the benefits spill over to everyone interested in new and effective thinking. In a culture where artists and scientists routinely scuffle (at least compared to business people, sports stars and media celebrities), such patronage is an insufficient but welcome and widely beneficial corrective.