Dafnis Prieto’s
Sí o Sí Quartet

From those virtuosic beginnings, Prieto has earned major awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and an equally lustrous reputation as a sideman and a composer. His gifts were heard most recently on his albums Back to the Sunset, which won a Grammy in 2018, and Transparency, one of the best Latin jazz albums of 2020, according to the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll. “A lot of bands, many of them Cuban ones, can show you how polyrhythm works with great clarity, as if demonstrating the intersection of gears,” Ben Ratliff said in The New York Times. “Mr. Prieto routinely does that all alone, with grace notes, even when he’s playing behind someone else’s solo. But his style of composition explicitly puts the ensemble first.”

The quartet is a centrifuge in which Cuban folk and contemporary jazz spin together with hypnotic finesse, as was captured on the album Live at Jazz Standard NYC.  “Dafnis Prieto is a revolutionary drummer as well as visionary composer and bandleader. His Si o Si Quartet possesses an ability to musically communicate that almost borders on telepathy.” (Drumhead Magazine)