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The pianist and composer Arturo O'Farrill knows better than almost anyone that over 50 years of a trade embargo between the U.S. and Cuba hasn't fully prevented the exchange of jazz between the two countries. He's known it since he first visited Cuba in 2002. Not that he's happy about the relationship. Years of fruitful dialogue between musicians have been lost, and as the leader of a big band known as the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, that's a problem he wants to address.
O'Farrill was raised and lives in New York City, though his roots are certainly Cuban. His father was the late Chico O'Farrill, a composer/bandleader and Cuban emigre who was instrumental in the development of Afro-Cuban jazz in the first place. Chico O'Farrill was there when the virtuoso Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo was working with virtuoso American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie -- a thought that continues to inspire Arturo O'Farrill today. Though neither spoke the other's language, they communicated through their roots in Afro-Western music.
Arturo O'Farrill's latest record with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra is called Cuba: The Conversation Continues. He got six composers to envision, in their own ways, the continuation of a musical conversation that Gillespie and Pozo started. And he recorded it in Havana -- just days after President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba.--PATRICK JARENWATTANANON.
