A maestro for an age of borders

Arturo O'Farrill's music is the soundtrack of our shared humanity

Arturo O’Farrill at Birdland, Dec. 17 2023. Photo: PW

Thank heaven for small miracles. For their last Sunday-night gig at Birdland before Christmas, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra packed the joint.

Situated on West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan, Birdland is a big club, 200 seats around cabaret tables and an indeterminate further number of patrons layered around the bar. O’Farrill and his musicians have played there, in one configuration or another, on most Sundays since Bill Clinton was the president. Familiarity would have had plenty of time to breed contempt, or at least apathy, by now. But O’Farrill and his 16 musicians keep finding new things to write and play. So the crowds keep coming.

The early set on December 17 began with an extended solo from alto saxophonist Adison Evans over a parade rhythm from the drums on “Iko Iko,” an ancient New Orleans R&B tune. The rest of the hour was devoted to original compositions and standards from the Latin jazz repertoire. “Vaca Frita,” a piece O’Farrill wrote in tribute to a garlic-laden Cuban beef dish, was followed by “Rumba Abierta,” an arrangement of an old Mario Bauza tune written by O’Farrill’s father, the late big-band composer Chico O’Farrill. Solos from all hands were long, the performances loose and casual. Arturo O’Farrill played traffic cop by crashing out two-fisted cues at the piano, or turning on his bench to gesture to the trombones.

One trumpet player, Bryan Davis, is from England. Another, Rachel Therrien, is from Rimouski, Quebec. Keisel Jimenez, on congas, is Cuban. Evans, the alto saxophonist, is only a few years out of Juilliard and has since spent much of her time playing in stadiums behind Beyoncé, JayZ and Nicki Minaj. It takes a village to raise a roof.

It’s honourable work to fill a club on a weekly basis for decades on end. But if that were all Arturo O’Farrill was up to these days, I would not be writing about him. I went to hear him, and I interviewed him before my trip, because it is becoming clearer that at 63, O’Farrill has become a leading figure in American music. And because his music is about the ways cultures interact across the Americas and across oceans, it is becoming increasingly germane to the current moment. O’Farrill writes music for and about people who have come a long way, or whose routes are blocked by geography or politics. He is writing and performing a soundtrack for an age of migration. He has won six Grammy awards, but he deserves attention beyond the steady recompense of a worthy craftsman.

I began to re-evaluate him when I realized that, for the third time in as many years, he had delivered one of the year’s most remarkable albums in any genre. And the three albums didn’t really even sound like the same guy had made them.

Two of these recent albums are easily described. I will take the long way around to telling you about the third, because it’s turning into the story of a life.

The most recent album of the three that perked my ears up is Legacies, a set of rich improvisations that showcase O’Farrill as a pianist, either solo or with a whip-smart young rhythm section of bassist Liany Mateo and drummer Zach O’Farrill, the pianist’s son. For many listeners it’s forced a re-evaluation of O’Farrill’s merit as an instrumentalist. Turns out he’s not just a composer who can poke out the odd piano solo the way some people type. He is, as the reviewer for Down Beat magazine put it, “one of our greatest living pianists.”

Legacies is O’Farrill’s second album for Blue Note, the legendary record label that still retains a measure of cultural clout in an age of exploded markets and attention spans. The first was 2021’s …Dreaming in Lions…, a pair of dance suites for a 10-piece ensemble that O’Farrill wrote for Cuba’s Malpaso Dance Company. If Legacies is about unconstrained improvisation, …Dreaming in Lions… is about discipline in composition and performance. It’s understated, almost courtly. It nods politely at the minimalist classical compositions of composers like Steve Reich. Clearly written to leave dancers plenty of room to shine, it still rewards repeated close listening. But it lingers afterward as a kind of mystery.

“I have been chaotic for many years,” O’Farrill told me earlier this year on a Zoom call from a tour stop in St. Louis, when I asked him about his deeply varied repertoire. “I never have known how to stay in a lane. In many ways, that's been the strength of my career. And it's also been the bane of many critics. Where do I fit? Am I this, am I that, am I Latino, am I White, am I Black? All these things. Is my music jazz? Is it Latin? Is it contemporary classical? I don't really see the division. That's my problem.”

Fortunately it wasn’t a problem for Don Was, the defiant Detroit eccentric who has been Blue Note’s president for a decade. “When I bought …Dreaming In Lions… to Don Was I was flabbergasted that he enjoyed it,” O’Farrill said. “And even more amazed that he put it out. There are actual pieces on …Dreaming in Lions… that don't have any improvisation — gasp! I mean, Duke Ellington did that, but, you know, it's not part of the accepted language of jazz today.

“When Don said, ‘Well, why don't you go into your roots as a musician, and do a straight-ahead jazz album?’ I was blown away. …I love waving my arms in front of a bunch of musicians. I also love sitting down to the piano and not worrying about 20 people.”

He grew up as the son of a legendary big-band arranger, the Cuban-born Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill, who wrote in the 1950s and 1960s for Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and others. It was Chico O’Farrill’s band that started the long Sunday-night run at Birdland. Arturo was born in Mexico City, moved to New York City at 5, and eventually inherited his father’s band by degrees, first as Chico’s pianist and HR department, then as his successor after Chico died in 2001.

But Arturo has told reporters that growing up, he felt “tremendous ambivalence” about his father’s musical legacy and environment.

Latin jazz, or Afro-Hispanic or Afro-Cuban or Afro-Latin jazz, rose to prominence in the 1940s as a hybrid of Cuban dance music and American big-band music, popularized in the first instance by a singer named Machito and his brother-in-law, trumpeter Mario Bauza. They taught Cuban rhythms to the leading jazz players in New York City, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. At its best the new hybrid expanded the music’s rhythmic possibilities the way bebop had broadened its harmonic vocabulary. Gillespie always said incorporating those rhythms and structures into jazz was the thing that made him proudest.

But big bands and the music of the Cuban diaspora have often been easy to dismiss as party tunes for socialites. From Desi Arnaz to Lou Bega, mambo and salsa music has often been lightweight and unserious. It sure seemed that way to Arturo O’Farrill, who studied classical piano performance at a succession of East Coast conservatories and whose early role models in jazz had nothing to do with congas and puffy shirts. He wanted to play like Herbie Hancock, and his first prestige gig was with Carla Bley, a leading experimentalist who hired him when he was 19 for a gig at Carnegie Hall and kept him in her band for most of the ’80s.

Eventually, he realized that he wasn’t taking a break from seriousness when he played his father’s music and that of his father’s peers. The layers of superimposed rhythm and metre that require an Afro-Latin band to hire extra percussionists provide all kinds of opportunity for a writer or soloist to screw up. So this music offers plenty of what every musical egghead yearns for: a hundred chances a night to reconcile freedom, complexity and risk.

“It's funny because the big band is such a sedentary institution when it's used as a museum organization,” O’Farrill told me. “But when you look at Thad Jones and Duke Ellington and Chico O'Farrill, when they started writing big band music, it wasn't sedentary. They started writing music that was all over the place… To me, this is the opportunity to take a sedentary setting and explode it in wild modernistic ways. And I've enjoyed that. I enjoyed that so much.”

Shortly after Chico died, Arturo O’Farrill was rehearsing for a concert at Lincoln Center with that institution’s resident jazz big band under the direction of the legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The formidable musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra couldn’t manage to nail the phrasing. Soon after, Marsalis asked O’Farrill to take the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, as it was then called, into Lincoln Center as a constituent organization under Jazz at Lincoln Center’s organizational umbrella. The affiliation lasted for about half of the 1990s and offered O’Farrill things he couldn’t get anywhere else: administrative help, plush seats, admiring audiences and peer pressure from one of the most ambitious figures in jazz.

The only thing missing was money. “Wynton was very much the gentleman about it. He sat me down and said, ‘Look, we didn't have a business strategy for you. We didn't have a real philosophical strategy.’ I said, ‘Wynton, did we somehow not — did we fail somehow?’ He said, ‘No, you brought great honor to the House of Swing.’ It was an amicable parting. I took it badly at first. But to be honest with you, to this day, I stay in touch with Wynton. I think he's a huge hero.”

In 2007, back out on his own with neither a father nor a blue-chip cultural institution to catch his fall, O’Farrill started making the decisions that have led, a decade and a half later, to his current position of cultural eminence. “I said, ‘Why can't I do this on my own?’ So I created a nonprofit called the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance.” [The name change, from Afro-Cuban to Afro-Latin, reflected a greatly expanded range of diaspora influences, from Puerto Rico to Mexico to Argentina to Brazil and beyond.]

“I went into a local public school — a dangerous one — and said, ‘Can we teach here?’ I went to my bartender, my local bartender, and borrowed $40,000 dollars to have a performance season. And every year I said, ‘If I meet these goals, I'll continue.” And we kept growing.”

Today the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance pays 47 teaching artists to teach the music of the Afro-Hispanic diaspora in 21 New York City schools. O’Farrill was won six Grammys and two Latin Grammys. The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra tours internationally and has collaborated with many of the leading dance and theatre organizations in the United States.

“And behold, we are building,” O’Farrill said. A group of developers and community associations in East Harlem, the largely Latino neighbourhood of Manhattan known as El Barrio, have come together to build 19 storeys of affordable housing in a building to be called Timbale Terrace. In the kind of zoning swap that many cities promote in a bid to anchor social-development projects in neighbourhoods where there’s a lot going on, O’Farrill’s association will run a cultural and educational space on the first two floors of the building, under the name Casa Belongo. The development weathered a heavy spell of NIMBYism from neighbours who weren’t sure they wanted social housing in their neighbourhood. But the project’s chances of making it into the real world seem to have firmed up in recent weeks.

Casa Belongo? What’s the second word mean? “It has several different derivations, that word. It can mean a spell, it's African, it's Afro-Cuban, it's Spanish, it's a lot of things. But the most important part of that word to me is ‘Belong.’ We're not including. You already belong. We already belong. You and I belong to each other. There's no invitation necessary.”

I have always had a soft spot for leaders and creators who, whatever they thought they were doing, discover they are in the business of building their community. “All I wanted to do was play piano like Herbie Hancock,” O’Farrill said. “All of a sudden, we're teaching kids, we're doing community work, we're doing preservation. And it's a huge thing. It's a huge attempt to create a sense of belonging, for all of us in this music. You don't have to be this or that to enjoy this music. It really does belong to all of us and the culture. All of us. It's part of Canadian culture. It's part of South American culture. It's part of American culture.”

As his ambition has expanded, O’Farrill has blown the doors right off his band’s guest list. He has collaborated with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and pianist Vijay Iyer, whose family roots are in India, and with hip-hop turntablist DJ Logic. Listening back to his recordings as I began to assess his work, it was clear to me that O’Farrill’s 2014 album The Offense of the Drum stands as a kind of manifesto of expanding musical possibility. It features Iyer on piano, Spanish flamenco singer Antonio Lizana, and a rap by Chilo Cajigas about Puerto Ricans’ contributions to American culture:

It sometimes happens that, as an artist’s understanding of his materials expands, his social ambitions grow in pace. Which brings us to the album between …Dreaming in Lions… and Legacies.

At first listen O’Farrill’s 2022 album Fandango at the Wall In New York, which won his latest Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, is much more of a party than his other recent recordings. It’s loose, festive, a kind of jam session between the Orchestra and some traditional Mexican musicians. But sometimes the background story behind a party matters, and in this case it matters quite a lot.

In 2018 a member of O’Farrill’s board sent him a New York Times article about an odd, inspiring annual ritual that has been taking place at the border between San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico. Every spring since 2008, that spot has become the venue for the Fandango Fronterizo — roughly, the “border jam” between musicians on either side of the border. The common musical idiom for these events is son jarocho, a string-based folk music from the rural Veracruz district in eastern Mexico.

The complication here is that the international border at this particular spot is defined by a tall fence. Even the approaches to the fence are heavily patrolled. The gauge of the fence has increased, its mesh tightened, over the years, so it’s harder for the players on either side to even see their opposite numbers on the other side. “It was very powerful,” Jorge Castillo, the librarian who developed the Fandango Fronterizo, told the Times. “The only thing that can cross besides the birds and the winds is the music.”

Reading about the border jams, O’Farrill told me, “I thought this was the most elegant artifice I've ever heard of in my life to actually use the elements — the fencing, the chicken wire, the attack dogs, the patrol guards, the automatic weaponry — to use those elements themselves, the very elements of separation and terror, to celebrate humanity and unity. I thought that was the most amazing, amazing thing I've ever read about.”

So O’Farrill assembled some trusted collaborators to reach out to Castillo. “We asked permission to perform there and to perform alongside these musicians, and to bring guests.” Castillo and the committee that runs the Fandango agreed. The following May, O’Farrill showed up with his band, recording equipment and a documentary film crew. The result was the first Fandango at the Wall album and an HBO special (so far unavailable on Crave).

The In New York in the new album’s name is a reflection of the next step in the project, which was to fly all the participants from San Diego and Tijuana and recreate the party in New York City.

Look, who’s fooling who. The Fandango Fronterizo captured the attention of the Times and a performing-arts group from Manhattan because in 2018 the political climate was increasingly fraught. The U.S. president at the time, Donald Trump, had made a massively beefed-up border wall one of his campaign themes. One gets the distinct impression O’Farrill has strong opinions about all this. He prefers not to speak Trump’s name if he can avoid it. But he has no manifesto to offer and no particular interest in deepening political divides. The whole point of the Fandango project, he said, is to bridge divisions.

“While there is a need for borders, there's no need to villainize immigrants, no need whatsoever. That is an aberration of the human principle, let alone the American principle upon which this nation was founded. And so in a way to do this in a non-political setting — just celebrating music and tradition — was a stroke of genius. And that's because of these people. Their ingenuity is that they don't concentrate on the politics, they concentrate on the culture and the framework of art and life and love and all the things that we really hold dear to ourselves.”

Was any of it lost in translation when they performed it in New York instead of at the border?

“You know, it's funny, son jarocho is not a performance-oriented activity. One of the most beautiful things about son jarocho is that everyone's invited to pick up a jarana and play along.” So the visitors from Tijuana, themselves playing in a musical tradition from another part of Mexico, were comfortable playing it somewhere else with new people.

All of which suggests that the Fandango project needn’t stop its nomadic, redemptive journey at New York. At a time when migration has become a defining story of our time, in the United States, Canada and beyond, perhaps there’s room to repeat a simple, even festive reminder: that people don’t really leave everything behind when they leave everything behind. They bring their humanity with them.

“My dream with Jorge, this project -- I don't know what organization I need to apply to, but it would be a dream of mine, to perform this at the Guantanamo border. At the Canadian border. The demilitarized zone between the Koreas… I bet you there are places where this could easily take place where it could be done with great, great, great, great meaning. Great purposefulness. And it would resonate throughout the world.”

As I began to grasp the scale of O’Farrill’s musical ambition, I started to wonder why he hadn’t yet won the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, or landed one of its annual no-strings grants for creative Americans, the so-called “genius grants.”

But the ways of the MacArthur Foundation are mysterious, and a grant doesn’t make for much of a party. Meanwhile this newsletter is read by people who run some of Canada’s largest performing-arts organizations, and by others who work at one of the capital city’s larger embassies. If musicians from Tijuana and Veracruz and San Diego have already convened under the Brooklyn Bridge to celebrate our essential shared humanity…

…perhaps they could meet again, farther North, to perform with musicians of a hundred diasporas who live and work in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver or Ottawa. Just off the top of my head, I know a nice spot across the river from Ogdensburg, NY. And now I also know a six-time Grammy winner who has begun to hope that from his seat at the piano, he might help change the world.