Alfredo Rodriguez. Photo by Robert Ifarreli. Courtesy Fundarte.

The 15th edition of Global Cuba Fest — presented by Miami Light Project and FUNDarte on March 5 and 12 — will offer a snapshot of the island’s music and culture constructed from images and sounds from a dozen different angles. Few are more improbable than those by Cuban pianist and composer Alfredo Rodríguez and Cameroonian bassist, singer and composer Richard Bona.

The son of a well-known television presenter, singer and entertainer of the same name, Rodríguez, 36, has turned a personal story that reads like a Hollywood script into an international music career. Producer Quincy Jones heard Rodríguez at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006 and sought to work with him. Rodríguez had to return to Cuba, but neither one forgot.
Three years later, after visiting his father in Mexico, Rodríguez took a flight to Laredo, TX, carrying, he once recalled, a suitcase with a sweater, and a pair of jeans. At the airport he was arrested. He pleaded with immigration officials, told the absurd-sounding truth — that he was coming to work with Quincy Jones — and they eventually put him on a cab to the border, where he started his trek to Los Angeles and a new life. His first concert in his new home was at the Hollywood Bowl. He has since recorded five albums, three of them co-produced by Jones.

Once anchored on formal classical studies, and the schooling on Cuban popular music he got playing on stage in his father’s orchestra, Rodríguez’s music has been opened to global influences by constant traveling and Jones’ ecumenical musical outlook.

“I am much more of a global artist now,” Rodríguez said recently. “The world that I would like to see has no walls and no borders.”

Rodríguez, who has been living in South Florida for the past two years, is putting his globalism to work in this show.

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