Joe Colón

The crowd was still filing into Parque Sixto Escobar, setting up folding chairs on the tarp-covered stadium field, when the students from Berklee College of Music, who had been flown down for the performance, struck up a dramatic, driving version of "Sketches of Spain." Opening the final day of Puerto Rico Heineken JazzFest '99, in June, marked a triumphant homecoming for the young Puerto Rican men, nine of them natives of the island and one from the U.S. mainland.

They were followed by a big band from Berklee in Puerto Rico '99, a week-long clinic for Puerto Rican musicians that is coordinated with the festival. With all of four days' rehearsal, the energetic young players roared through two tunes, finishing with Horace Silver's rollicking "Nutville" to wild applause.

A Berklee faculty band was scheduled to perform as well, but got bumped when thunderstorms canceled the open-air concert the night before, and two extra acts had to be squeezed into the long Sunday session. It was just as well.

"The kids always kill us," says Associate Vice President for International Programs Larry Monroe. "Which is as it should be. They bring the house down. You can feel [the audience] light up for these kids."

It has been a milestone year for Berklee in Puerto Rico. In this fifth year of the program, Berklee in Puerto Rico '99 took its largest group ever to the festival. "We usually don't have enough trombones for a big band," Monroe told the festival crowd, "but this year we had plenty."

Also, for the first time, Berklee put the fruit of the annual event on display: Berklee in Puerto Rico graduates who have gone on to full-time study in Boston. Finally, not only did the week end with Berklee handing out the most scholarship money ever—more than $50,000—to promising participants, but Mendez & Company, sponsor of the jazz festival and host of Berklee in Puerto Rico, awarded $10,000 in additional scholarship aid to the program's two top students.

That the relationship between Berklee College of Music and Puerto Rico has flourished—indeed, that it exists at all—is thanks to one man, Luis Alvarez: Berklee alumnus, businessman, festival promoter, and now, trustee of Berklee College of Music.

Since 1995, San Juan has been a regular stop for Berklee On the Road, the international series of workshops and clinics that promote the college's unique contemporary-music education and that cultivate talent from around the world. Musically, culturally, and even politically, Puerto Rico—whose natives are U.S. citizens and often have relatives on the mainland—has proved to be a natural for Berklee when it comes to recruiting young musicians.

"When we talk about Latin music, in jazz and pop, we principally mean the cultural music from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic," says Monroe. With Cuba closed and the Dominican Republic gripped by poverty, he says, "Puerto Rico becomes a seminal locale for that music."

The rich musical environment—in Puerto Rico, dancing to live bands is a favored pastime—particularly nurtures horn players. At other On the Road events, guitarists and keyboardists fill the clinics. In Puerto Rico, it's saxophone and brass players ("good ones, too," Monroe observes), not to mention drummers and percussionists.

The island also meets all of Monroe's specifications for a successful Berklee way station. "The perfect site," he says, "is one that has a substantial enough economy to produce students who might come to Berklee, has an indigenous music that has impact on the world-music movement—jazz, pop, all the twentieth-century contemporary music that this school specializes in—and a hosting agency that makes it easy for us to go there. Puerto Rico's perfect in that sense."

The hosting agency, in this case, is Luis Alvarez '83. Alvarez is vice president of Mendez & Company, an importer and distributor of food and beverages on the island. There was never any doubt that Alvarez would join the family business—founded in 1912, and now into its fourth generation—and he prepared for his role by earning a business degree from the University of Notre Dame. But before he was ready to settle down, Alvarez had some youthful passions to satisfy.

Joe Colón

"About six months before graduation, it hit me," says Alvarez. "Did I want to go to Puerto Rico and start doing what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life? And of course, the answer was no."

The two things he wanted to do, he says, were "to fly and to go to music school." A bass player, Alvarez had had a band in high school that played for weddings, coming-out parties, and the like. At Notre Dame, he was in a 10-piece band, for which he also wrote arrangements—"knowing absolutely nothing," he says. So rather than return home, he went to Berklee, where he studied arranging and composition, finishing in six straight semesters.

"It was the best two years of my life," says Alvarez. "What Notre Dame did for my mind, Berklee did for my soul."

As he finished up his Berklee studies in 1983, Alvarez began to indulge his other fantasy. He trained for a private pilot's license in Massachusetts and then joined the Puerto Rico Air National Guard and learned to fly fighters, and, later, helicopters. Now, besides running the Mendez & Company liquor division, Alvarez maintains a separate business in helicopter and airplane charters as well as a flight training school.

In the late 1980s, Alvarez found a way to combine business and musical pleasure through sponsorship of what was then called the San Juan Jazz Festival, in the name of one of the brands handled by Mendez & Company, Heineken beer. After running into problems with the event's management, Alvarez took over the festival himself in 1991, and has been executive producer ever since. It's a job that is full of headaches, but for Alvarez it's also a dream come true.

"It provided me a fantastic outlet to channel my music interest that was directly related to the company," says Alvarez. Besides the four days of music itself, the Puerto Rico Heineken JazzFest each year results in a television special and a CD of festival performances.

Since 1995 Mendez & Company has subsidized the Berklee in Puerto Rico program, with the help of donations from IBM, KPMG Peat Marwick, and the Barros en Carrion insurance agency. The proceeds of the festival CD also support Berklee in Puerto Rico.

Like all Berklee On the Road programs, Berklee in Puerto Rico offers what Monroe calls "a Berklee sampler." This year, some 100 students went through four days of classes and ensembles, a day of clinics and concerts led by the seven-person Berklee faculty and the visiting Puerto Rican Berklee students, and a morning of ensemble performances, program graduation, and scholarship awards, all leading up to the JazzFest appearance.

"It's a fantastic source of satisfaction to provide a vehicle for local musicians to learn and develop themselves," says Alvarez.

There were particular sources of satisfaction this year, for all involved. Miguel Zenon, who attended Berklee in Puerto Rico '95, was back, playing in the festival's opening act, Afrorican Jazz, led by William Cepeda, himself a Berklee graduate ('85). Alto saxophonist Zenon says he saw the first year of Berklee in Puerto Rico "as a door to be opened. It was great. The best young musicians in Puerto Rico all got into it."

Joe Colón

Zenon was already interested in Berklee, but winning a scholarship at the workshop "gave me a lot of hope"—enough hope that by January of 1996 he was in Boston. Zenon graduated from Berklee in May 1998, and is now completing a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music, not to mention playing at an international jazz festival in his hometown.

"It was great playing at home, great playing at the festival," says Zenon. "Growing up, you always had to check out the festival. Now I'm playing, and all my friends are out there."

Among those friends was the band of current Berklee students, introduced at the festival as "Puerto Rico in Berklee." Trombonist Luis León, who attended three Puerto Rico programs before coming to Berklee this year, proposed the all-Puerto Rican band to Monroe. Realizing that there are more than a dozen Berklee in Puerto Rico veterans now on campus in Boston, Monroe gave the go-ahead, and León put together the band, which included percussionist Francisco Quiñones; saxophonists Nestor Toro, Luis Rodríguez, and José Heredia; pianist Aton Castillo; bassist Alfonso Simonpietri; drummer Ruben Amador; and guitarists Ricardo Gonzales and Wilfredo Carrasquillo, with trumpeter Albert Leusink of the Netherlands filling out the horn section.

"It's really special, coming back to show people how I play," says alto saxophone player Rodríguez. The jazz composition major is especially proud that the band played one of his tunes at the festival. "That's even better because that's what I want to do. They hear me playing and hear my music."

In performing not only at the JazzFest but also at Berklee in Puerto Rico '99—held this year at the Escuela Libre de Musica Ernesto Ramos Antonini, which several of the Berklee students attended—these student musicians were sending a message to their young counterparts. "It can be done," says León. "They think it can't because of the money. But it can be done."

Saxophonist Luis Torres and drummer/percussionist Tony Escapa got all the convincing they needed. Honored as the top two performers at Berklee in Puerto Rico '99, they each received $7,000 scholarships to Berklee College of Music. In addition, they each became the first recipients of an additional $5,000 scholarship from Mendez & Company. In future years, Mendez will award one scholarship to a Berklee in Puerto Rico participant and renew the previous winner's scholarship for a second year.

"I feel incredibly honored," says Escapa. "I never thought I'd get anything. I thought a lot of players here deserved something."

"I want to cry, but the tears don't come out," says Torres. Both say they want to come to Berklee and that the scholarships provide a big boost toward that dream. "It's a big start," says Torres.

Alvarez is himself enjoying a big start of a different kind, as a trustee of Berklee College of Music. "Berklee gave me a lot when I was there," says Alvarez. "I was able to give something back, through Mendez & Company in Puerto Rico. Now, to have another opportunity to have a direct impact on Berklee as such wraps up the entire relationship."

"Personally, I'm really thrilled he's joining the board," says Executive Vice President Gary Burton. "We haven't had many alums. Luis brings not only dedication to music, but also his perspective of having been part of Berklee himself."

"Berklee is still a young college," says President Lee Eliot Berk. "Luis is in the vanguard of an expanding group of successful alums increasingly being invited to join our board, which now includes New York-based Epic Senior Vice President John Doelp ('77) and Los Angeles-based singer/vocal coach Leanne Summers ('88). Luis's is a voice listened to very carefully by the other trustees, and everyone appreciates how generously he has made Berklee and the talented student musicians of Puerto Rico so central in his philanthropy."

Alvarez expects his service on the Board of Trustees to be a learning experience as much as anything else, which he says places him in a familiar position. "It is both a great honor and a source of satisfaction to find myself studying at Berklee once again."