Not only does Grammy-winning jazz pianist and bandleader Arturo O'Farrill have a lengthy history with the Maverick Concerts series, at which he and his quartet will perform on August 12, he also has another important local connection, one that predates his Maverick association. In 1979 he got his first big break in the area as a sideman at age 19, when influential Woodstock pianist, composer, and bandleader Carla Bley caught him playing at a local bar and immediately snapped him up for a three-year stint with her band that began with a show at Carnegie Hall.
"My jazz friends and I would come up from the city every weekend to Mount Tremper and jam, and there've always been so many great musicians to play with [in the Hudson Valley]," recalls O'Farrill. "I'm always happy to get back to Maverick to play. I was always a city kid who loved to escape to the country. It's my great hope that I can live there someday."
Arturo is the son of famed Cuban-born composer, arranger, band leader, and trumpeter Chico O'Farrill, one of the central figures in the development of Afro-Cuban jazz. Born in Mexico City, the younger O'Farrill moved when he was five years old with his family to New York, where his father worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Tito Puente, La Lupe, Celia Cruz, and Machito (with Charlie Parker, Chico composed the latter bandleader's "Afro-Cuban Suite"). Arturo started piano lessons at age six and graduated from the La Guardia School of Music and Art and went on to study at the Manhattan School of Music, the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. After leaving the Carla Bley Big Band, he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Bowie, Howard Johnson, Steve Turre, Harry Belafonte (as music director), and others before taking over his father's orchestra and launching Lincoln Center's long-in-residence Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
O'Farrill's work with the orchestra, which was founded to bring traditional Cuban music and American jazz together, has further broadened and bridged boundaries by adding Haitian, Dominican, Mexican, and South American flavors to the mix, while outside of the ensemble the leader has played free jazz and experimented with hip hop. He and his orchestras have won Grammys for Best Latin Instrumental Album (2014's Final Night at Birdland) and Best Latin Jazz Album (2015's The Offense of the Drum) and were nominated for a 2016 Grammy for Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded in Havana just two days after President Obama gave the announcement that the US would normalize relations with Cuba. (A decision that the following administration, unfortunately, reversed.)
"We're in a perilous point in the journey of the history of this country right now," observes O'Farrill, who is an activist as well as a musician. "The forces on the far right have hijacked the narrative and taken it into an 'us versus them' realm. But people are more nuanced than that. Even the most die-hard MAGA supporter has love in their heart, carries pictures of their children. My hope with playing is that people can just come together and enjoy the music and be in the spirit of the moment."
