About
Puerto Rican–American bassist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer Daniel Ellis Perez’s work is grounded in listening, responsibility, and a rigorous commitment to individual voice. Though he began as a guitarist, Perez emerged organically as a bassist—an instrument that became central to his musical and ethical framework. His practice prioritizes time, feel, and deep attentiveness, drawing from jazz’s lineage while resisting imitation as an end in itself.
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Perez understands jazz as simultaneously a language, a lineage, and an ethic. His relationship to the tradition is shaped less by stylistic replication than by the example set by its innovators: artists who transformed inherited materials through presence, risk, and self-definition. Listening widely across Black American music, rock, and alternative forms, Perez synthesizes these influences into a compositional voice concerned as much with meaning as with form.
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Being a 2024 graduate of the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), Perez was a member of the ChiArts Jazz Combo from 2021 through 2024. During his time at ChiArts, the ensemble received the DownBeat 45th Annual Student Music Award for Outstanding Performance by a Small Jazz Combo in 2022 and also earned recognition in the Blues/Rock/Pop category under faculty advisor and saxophonist Anthony Bruno. These formative years rooted Perez in ensemble discipline, listening, and the communal dimensions of music-making.
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Compositionally, Perez’s work often responds to contemporary social and political realities while engaging sacred narrative as a living framework. Drawing from the Gospels and early Christian texts, he treats faith not as abstraction or performance, but as an interpretive lens shaped by marginality, humility, and lived struggle. His music moves fluidly between the devotional, the observational, and the confrontational, reflecting both personal experience and broader communal crisis.
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From 2019 to 2022, Perez released music under the name My Lonely Bench, a project that began as private expression and evolved into a formative compositional laboratory. Through releases including Lonely Bench EP (2019), I Think I’m Fine (2021), and later singles drawn from the unreleased concluding album A Seclusion Room, 2019–2022, the project explored themes of loneliness, longing, and emotional searching. Though once considered closed, My Lonely Bench remains an essential root in Perez’s artistic development and continues to inform his compositional voice.
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Moving forward, Perez increasingly presents work under his full name while maintaining My Lonely Bench as a creative foundation rather than a discarded past. His current process is intentionally paced, shaped by patience and reflection rather than immediacy, with writing often beginning as poetic fragments before taking musical form.
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As a performer and collaborator, Perez is known for his strong sense of time, musical honesty, and grounding presence. He has performed alongside artists including Ernest Dawkins, Derrick Gardner, and Pharez Whitted, and continues to engage Chicago’s jazz community across generations. In 2023, Perez was awarded the Kiewit–Wang Scholarship through the Jazz Institute of Chicago, which supported private study with bassist Dennis Carroll. He currently studies at Wilbur Wright College, where he is pursuing an Associate’s degree while continuing to perform, compose, and develop new work. In 2025 and 2026, he performed thrice with one of the Northwestern Small Jazz Combos.
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Born and raised in Chicago, Perez’s worldview and sound are shaped by the city’s contradictions—its creativity, segregation, violence, and resilience. Rather than positioning his music as declarative or prescriptive, he allows political and social realities to surface inevitably through composition. His work invites listeners not toward resolution, but toward engagement: to listen closely, to ask questions, and to encounter music as a shared social space rather than a closed statement.
