Category Archives: Latin Jazz

Arturo O’Farrill – Family, Jazz and the Music of Cuba, Revisited

26 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Home, In Other Words, Jazz, Latin Jazz, On Music

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Arturo O’Farrill Photo by Laura Mariet ©

Born in Mexico City and raised in New York City, pianist, composer and educator Arturo O’Farrill grew up close to Cuba and its culture.
Geography and physical distances can be just an illusion. After all, O’Farrill is the son of the great, late Cuban composer and arranger Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill and is himself a leading figure in Afro-Cuban jazz. Deepening the connection, in the past two decades, professional and family reasons have taken O’Farrill to his father’s homeland.

The results include albums such as Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded in Havana and features his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and several top-flight Cuban musicians. The album earned a 2016 Grammy nomination, and O’Farrill won a Grammy, his sixth, for “Best Instrumental Composition” for the “Afro Latin Jazz Suite,” the centerpiece of the recording.

In 2017, O’Farrill also celebrated Cuban music history – and his family´s – in a moving collaboration with Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Chucho Valdes, son of the late Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Bebo Valdes, another essential figure in the history of modern Afro-Cuban music and a friend of Chico O’Farrill. The resulting Familia, a tribute to the elders, is a multigenerational recording that features younger musical members of both families.
O’Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra will present some of this work, and more, in “Jazz Roots: Cuba: New Perspectives” on Jan. 10 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

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Daymé Arocena Sonocardiogram

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

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Daymé Arocena performing at the North Beach Bandshell, Miami Beach, in March 2019

These are my liner notes for Daymé Arocena’ s Sonocardiograma (Brownswood Recordings) released last month. 

Sonocardiograma, the name of Cuban singer and songwriter Daymé Arocena new release is not just a title but also both a description and declaration of purpose.

“The name Sonocardiograma is inspired in the word echocardiogram, a medical exam to check if your heart is working properly,” explained Daymé in a recent conversation from her home in Havana, Cuba. “When we were thinking about the concept of the album and its title, we knew we wanted to create something that was a snapshot of who we are inside.”

The “we” Daymé refers to is her quartet, comprising Jorge Luis Lagarza Pérez, piano, and arranging; Rafael Aldama Chiroles, bass; and Marcos Morales Valdés, drums. “We not only always play together, and tour together but we celebrate birthdays together, accompany each other after breakups, console each other with family matters. We are a family,” she says.

“ We wanted it to capture our personality, our world, how we hear the music,” she explains. “We recorded it in Havana. There were no producers, and we didn’t want to go to a recording studio, and we lucked out and found this great space that had been an artist’s studio and we recorded there, all in one room, surrounded by art, cats and dogs and ambient noises. We wanted a record that had the energy and the spirit we have in concert. Sonocardiograma is about who we are.”

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A New Season of Jazz Roots and the Art of Selling Jazz in Miami

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

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Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval performing on a Tribute to Tito Puente, part of a recent Jazz Roots series at the Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami. Photo courtesy Daniel Azoulay ©

A few years ago, discussing the beginnings of Jazz Roots, the jazz concert series at the Adrienne Arsht Center, in Miami,  the late musician, producer, record label owner and entrepreneur Larry Rosen, a co-founder of the event, estimated that the opening season had “about 650 subscriptions — of which about 200 were from our neighbors in Fisher Island. And in most cases, it was not because they were great jazz fans. They just thought ‘These are our neighbors and we want to support them.’ That’s why they did it.”  It was a modest beginning, especially for such a large hall, but Rosen was neither surprised nor intimidated.
He had moved to South Florida from New York in 2000 and in that conversation he shrugged as he noted how “anyone who’s in the jazz business knew that Miami was not a jazz market. […] I certainly knew what to expect. But you don’t really understand Miami unless you live here.”
Jazz remains a hard sell in South Florida. And yet, since its launching in 2008, Jazz Roots has not only found its audience but become one of the mainstays of Miami’s cultural landscape.

Jazz Roots opens its season on Friday with British Invasion – Latin Style, featuring singer and songwriter José Feliciano, trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, pianist and arranger Shelly Berg, saxophonist Tim Ries, singers Lucy Woodward, Kate Reid, and Fantine and the University of Miami’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra.
The series continues with concerts by Mavis Staples and Charlie Musselwhite; pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro- Latin Jazz Orchestra; singer Kurt Elling; pianist, arranger, and composer Dave Grusin (who co-founded with Rosen the all-digital GRP record label), and saxophonist Branford Marsalis.

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