Nicaraguan Pianist, 16, Speaks From the Heart in Music

Iris Stevenson couldn’t believe her eyes. From the back of a darkened music room at Crenshaw High School, a student--surrounded by 60 classmates on risers--pointed a flashlight on the man of the moment, pianist Donald Vega Gutierrez.

The 16-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant, who once had to practice on a paper keyboard, was going to town as he improvised a jazz number.

When the concert was over, the students shouted for more--even though the 3 p.m. bell had already sounded.

“Receiving that approval from his peers was special,” says Stevenson, his music teacher at Crenshaw. Because his English skills are minimal, Gutierrez’s communication with most of his classmates has been limited.

“Music is my connection with my friends,” Gutierrez says in Spanish. “When I play I’m in another world, and I want to bring everyone into that world with me.”

Lately, he has been doing just that.

Two months ago Gutierrez--who arrived in the United States on July 4, 1989--performed Johnny Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” and dazzled 3,000 spectators at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

When the evening of music was over, composers Henry Mancini and Bill Conti and jazz critic Leonard Feather named him the winner of a Music Center Spotlight Award and the recipient of a $5,000 scholarship.

“His sense of beat, rhythm and timing are the things that struck me about him,” Mancini says. “It comes to him naturally. These are things that are totally lacking in young jazz players today. He needs to play with as many people and bands as possible and play solo as well and he’ll be all right.”

Adds Conti: “When he played the three of us went, ‘Wow!’ Donald had a sense of what jazz is all about rhythmically and technically, but most of all his playing seemed to be very emotional, and music of course is about feeling . His playing touched me.”

“Donald touches everyone he plays for because he plays from the heart,” says Stevenson. She encouraged her student to enter the competition, and later drove him to rounds of finals that began with 300 students in November and culminated with 12 finalists in March.

Gutierrez’s mother, Mayra, and stepfather, Faustino Castro, came to the United States in 1986. Their plan was to raise enough money to send for their three children and pay for ear operations that Gutierrez needed to correct a gradual hearing loss.

When Mayra and Faustino arrived in the United States, the land of opportunity proved to be a series of survival tests. The couple, who had been teachers in Nicaragua, collected aluminum cans and sold ice cream on the street to earn a living.

Somehow, they saved enough money to send for their sons. Helmuth Vega Gutierrez, now a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Berendo Middle School, and Diederich Castro, a 7-year-old first-grader at Magnolia Elementary, arrived in 1988. Donald, who had remained with relatives, came a year later.

Six months after his arrival, he underwent a successful operation on his ears. And this summer, he is scheduled for another operation--and plastic surgery--to correct a cleft palate.

The surgery will be paid for by a Music Center patron who also has paid for English lessons for the family.

“I really can’t believe all this is happening,” he says while sitting at his Yamaha piano, a gift from an anonymous donor. His family surrounds him in the living room of their small duplex near the USC campus. He presses his palms to his face--thinking about his good fortune. Tears fill his eyes.

“I know it makes my mom happy, and that’s what makes me the happiest,” he says.

With coaxing from his family, Gutierrez shows off his skills and plays an improvisational rendition of M. C. Hammer meets Chick Corea with a little bit of salsa tossed in.

Gutierrez then recalls his first encounters with a keyboard.

At 7, he learned to play the piano with his grandfather, Alberto Gutierrez, a 91-year-old poet who also plays the violin and guitar. At 11, Gutierrez began instruction at a music conservatory in his hometown of Masaya. After his parents left Nicaragua, he moved in with an uncle in Managua and studied at another conservatory for about three years before making the journey to the United States with a family friend.

Now, Gutierrez spends four to eight hours a day practicing at home after a full load of classes.

With the $5,000 scholarship, Gutierrez is able to continue Saturday classes at the R. D. Colburn School of Performing Arts near USC. “What makes him stand out is that he is a giving player,” says Clay Jenkins, Colburn’s director of jazz studies. “Most players are self-indulgent, but he is polite and listens to other players and tries to fit in. He is not a limelight-grabbing kind of person and he swings hard. And that’s something you can’t teach. You’re born with that.”

This summer he will spend two months at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Mich.

When he’s not playing, Gutierrez listens to cassette tapes of his favorite jazz artists: Corea, Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor and Bill Evans, and Latin jazz performers Cucho Valdez and Papo Lucas. The tapes--which his family cannot afford--are made for him by friends. When he had no piano, he says, he practiced jazz improvisations on table tops, imagined the music playing in his head and thought about his grandfather, whom he misses dearly.

“When I play I get emotional. I think about my grandfather,” whom Gutierrez called after he won the award.

“He cried,” Gutierrez recalls, and then he said, “ ‘Feel proud because you have worked hard.’ ”

So have Gutierrez’s parents.

“We’ve done everything to make a living here,” says Gutierrez’s mother, who adds that her family has applied for political asylum, which, for now, allows them to remain and work legally in the United States. An immigration court judge will hear their case and could decide to deport them to Nicaragua.

“My husband and I have always felt that music and art and education are important for our children, and all of those things are taught in our home,” she says.

Adds her husband: “When we came to the United States, we knew it would be rough, but here you can do anything. . . . My wife and I knew if we worked hard, doors would open--if not for us, for our children.”