Deep down on Panama 500 to be released in the UK in February you’ll discover glimpses of a shared musical outlook with Wayne Shorter even if on many levels, and this album develops a characteristic more in common with the pianist’s 2010 album Providencia, the new work is as much an album about contextualising Pérez's homeland’s folkloric traditions within the language of contemporary jazz.

There is an ancient sounding aspect to the music, fitting in that the concept of the album, which marks the passage of 500 years since the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean.

Pérez looks ahead also to the centenary of the opening of the Panama Canal in his new ‘Canal Suite’ a major feature here.

At the heart of the album issued by the Detroit label Mack Avenue there’s Pérez’s trio of Ben Street and Adam Cruz, but personnel switches also involve Wayne Shorter Quartet bandmates bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, additional Latin American percussionists, strings, and Panamanian musicians on local instruments some of who also vocalise in the Guna language.

There’s a certain cinematic scope to ‘Rediscovery of the South Sea’ the haunting vocal cries and slight sense of fear the music invokes with the strings opening into a dance-like rhythm that Pérez manages to filter into distinct sectional units, with their strong sinewy rhythms and his own jagged interventions.

The shorter title track has a hand crafted feel to it, its lilting melody and bittersweet strings that on ‘Reflections on the South Sea’ develop into an elegy, Pérez’s rhapsodic side on the latter piece set against Sachi Patitucci’s cello to great effect. This piece is the first really significant achievement of the album: the elegy changed by some process of musical alchemy into a love song.

Next track ‘Abia yala (America)’ delves deep into the traditional music of Panama from its opening, and yet via the pianist’s Cubist “PanaMonkian” harmonies a very modern side to the setting. ‘Gratitude’ is a more conventional trio piece to start with but there’s so much depth to Pérez’s solo here, he has so much to say, even in the more straightforward tracks of the album that it all takes on a more monumental dimension appropriate given the themes of history and geography the pianist is exploring.

The three part ‘Canal Suite’ with its ‘Land of Hope’, short ‘Premonition in Rhythm’, and glorious ‘Melting Pot (Chocolito) lklor’ sections are the most tightly structured part of the album compositionally as the first draws out new ideas from the lower part of the piano register, a strong contrapuntal dimension that is very different to other pieces on the album, bursting to release itself which it does in the tamborito section ‘Premonition in Rhythm’ where the caja, pujador and repicador cowhide hollowed drums continue the conversation as a dance, the strands then drawn together on the final part of the suite.

Pérez’s compositional approach at times especially in the more orchestrated sections recalls Chick Corea’s larger scale works and Wayne Shorter's compositional approach. ‘The Expedition’ is a more free form trio piece, Brian Blade here raising and lowering the rhythm floor providing accents and blasts of sheer volume Pérez thrives on and interprets. The short vocalised conversation of ‘Narration to Reflections on the South Sea’ opens into the grandest aspect of the record, ‘Panama viejo’, where Pérez is almost Gershwin-like in his reach and ambition and the theme is like a beautiful vision.

Use of the Guna language at the end on ‘Celebration of Our Land’ is a charming way to draw one of Pérez’s most significant albums to date and represents one of the first agenda-setting albums of 2014.