Acclaimed pianist-composer, Guggenheim Fellow, and SF Jazz Collective member Edward Simon continues his deep dive into Latin American repertoire with Venezuela: Latin American Songbook Vol. 2 (ArtistShare, 2026). Whereas the pianist’s first volume covered music from several countries, the follow-up focuses almost exclusively on his native Venezuela. Simon, who has been in the U.S. for three decades, is arguably the most accomplished musician to hail from his home country.
Simon first arrived in Philadelphia as a fifteen-year-old, though some sources say he was as young as ten, and later studied as at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), he came from the same program that gave us Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and the late Joey De Francesco. For Venezuela specifically, advance press started to build for the record shortly before the gunboat sagas, and the eventual U.S. capture of the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro. When Simon set out to showcase Venezuelan composers who remain under the radar compared to those from Brazil, Argentina, and perhaps even Peru and Chile, he had no idea his country would be in the headlines globally. In that sense, the album is oddly timely.
On it, Simon delivers only six pieces in an inspired, warm, and elegant program of mostly folk music as played by his stellar trio with Reuben Rogers on bass and Adam Cruz on drums. The leader produced and arranged each track. One also features Simon’s fellow Venezuelan and Bay Area resident Jackeline Rago on cuatro and maracas.
Enrique Hidalgo’s “Presagio,” which translates to “Omen,” opens the program. The piece has overtones of European classical music but takes an unexpected bop-like turn halfway through, with a thorough exploration of melody and counterpoint. Cruz’s kit work in this section is especially noteworthy, thunderous, and spiked with cymbal flourishes. Danger certainly looms ahead. The romantic ballad, Lencho Amaro’s “Atardecer,” follows, a duo rendering with Simon’s piano intro and superb pizzicato work from Rogers, who often helms the melody. Here, and in several places throughout the record, the music transports the listener to the innocent days of the country, a time before the murderous dictatorship and violent cartels.
That nostalgic view of the past and its accompanying regret manifests most fully in the expansive, nearly eighteen-minute “Dama Antanona,” by Francisco de Paula Aguirre. Originally, like many of the composer’s pieces, it is primarily a waltz. Simon, however, treats it as a meditation, akin to a poetry recital, where every struck piano note, as every word in a poem, carries meaning. Simon moves from the light to the highly aggressive halfway through, a massive exposition of command of both rhythm and dynamics, pushed by the simpatico bass-drum tandem. Suddenly, there’s a pause, returning to balladic fare with Rogers stepping in with his authoritatively lyrical plucking.
“Anhelante,” by Jose “Pollo” Sifontes, is another piece about romantic yearning, featuring melodic arco turns from Rogers and tricky rhythms. The buoyant joropo rhythms of Jacob do Bandolim’s “El Vuelo dela Mosca” are enhanced by the guest percussionist, Rago. The program concludes on a mournful note, expressed best by Roger’s excellent bowed melody on Simon Diaz’s “Sabana” which tells of a Venezuelan peasant leaving the fields for the city during the oil boom. In it, the narrator says goodbye to their fields and speaks of how much they will miss that life. In that sense, perhaps we have come almost full circle, given the importance of oil to the U.S. involvement in the country.
While Simon wanted to showcase the inherent beauty of Venezuelan songs and past culture, relative to other Latin countries, a larger contrast seems at play. Over the past twenty years, almost any news from Venezuela in the American media has been negative, even tragic. These beautifully arranged pieces speak to a flourishing culture that, continues to endure.
‘Venezuela: Latin American Songbook, Vol. 2’ is out now on Artistshare. It can be purchased from the label. For further insight on the album, listen to Nate Chinen’s interview with Simon on his Substack page, The Gig.
