Arturo O’Farrill — who leads the Grammy-winning Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra and who founded its umbrella nonprofit organization, the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance — was recently named an artist in residence at the Harlem School of the Arts. That’s fitting. Latin influence has long been vital to the culture of Harlem, preceding jazz’s earliest stirrings there. All of the music O’Farrill makes with his orchestra has some root in dance rhythms, so perhaps it’s no accident that he joins choreographer Twyla Tharp, who inaugurated the school’s residency program last fall. O’Farrill’s large-scale ambitions, which initially blossomed at Lincoln Center and then met with a moment of doubt several years ago, have bloomed anew and in many forms. So this is a well-deserved next step for an artist and an organization that define Afro-Latin jazz largely by erasing restrictive borders, and that exert influence all over New York City.
O’Farrill and his orchestra will have access to rehearsal space and an administrative office at the school’s new Herb Alpert Center, on St. Nicholas Avenue at 141st Street. The orchestra, which will perform on July 10 as a part of Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing, continues its regular concert season at Symphony Space, a short subway ride south from the Harlem school. It also performs every Sunday night at Birdland, a further brief ride down to midtown, where O’Farrill previously led a legacy edition of his father’s celebrated band, the Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra. A commemoration of the latter group’s tenure is coming on CD, with “Final Night at Birdland” (Zoho, due August 13).
The story of O’Farrill’s awakening to Afro-Latin legacy and to a larger sense of purpose is stirring, as is the deepening of his music and mission. I’ll never forget him speaking from the Symphony Space Stage in late 2011, during a concert to honor percussionist-trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez and his brother, bassist Andy Gonzalez, and to mark the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance’s 10th anniversary.
“When I first began to play music, I rejected my father and my inherited culture,” O’Farrill said. “I didn’t want to play no clavé,” he said of the five-beat pattern elemental to Cuban music. “I remember Andy and Jerry Gonzalez telling me that it was OK to play clavé, that it was part of me. Andy urged me to check out the long line of great Cuban pianists who have established a great tradition, my father among them. I realized that the music we call ‘Latin’ is unbelievably important, unbelievably beautiful, and unbelievably hard to play — and as worthy of attention as any genre. In fact, in some ways it’s more so because it is a music that harkens closer to Africa than anything else in the current jazz pantheon. People who do it well should be commended for being truly multilingual in their approach to music.”
Initially, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra fulfilled corrective ambitions and practical needs within Lincoln Center’s mission. O’Farrill was impressed by Wynton Marsalis’s championing of jazz repertory at Lincoln Center. In the mid-1990s, he approached Marsalis about creating a repertory group specifically for Latin jazz. “Soon after that, there was a benefit performance pairing Wynton’s orchestra with Tito Puente’s,” he told me during an interview for the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “Wynton had me lead a rehearsal of the Latin numbers. I wanted them to play a Cuban phrase, but they just could not articulate it authentically. They would ‘jazz’ it up. They could not Afro-Cubanize it. Wynton had this faraway look in his eye. I think that’s when he realized that it takes a specialized group of musicians. It’s a different approach in terms of your embouchure and your tonguing. It’s a different approach artistically, mentally, and emotionally.” Soon after, Marsalis took up his idea, and put him in charge.
Much like the orchestra led by Marsalis, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra was originally meant to reinforce and extend historical repertory: Where Marsalis championed Ellington and Armstrong, O’Farrill showcased the classic mambo of “Machito” and Puente, as well as his father’s orchestral suites. But in 2008, the ALJO and Lincoln Center parted ways. O’Farrill sought better promotion, a broader artistic vision and, especially, a stronger focus on education. O’Farrill will always feel a sense of pride and debt toward Marsalis and Lincoln Center, he says; he thanked them from the stage at that 2011 anniversary concert. In the liner notes to the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s CD, “40 Acres and a Burro,” he described his feelings this way: “We are grateful to our hosts for our birth home, but it is definitely better to be the master of your own tidy cottage than a guest in someone else’s mansion.”
O’Farrill established his own nonprofit organization, the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, in 2007. At the inaugural Symphony Space concert in 2008, O’Farrill led the ALJO through a program of new music whose composers hailed from Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, among other points. It sounded like a declaration of independence, and of expansive intent. “Ten years of existence is a milestone for the ALJO,” O’Farrill said, “not so much because we survived, but because we’ve created a new entry point into the cultural conversation. Our embrace of the bigger picture in jazz has welcomed many more people into the fold.”
That rang truest in December 2010, when O’Farrill brought his orchestra to Havana, Cuba. (I wrote about that trip here.)
In part he realized a private dream — to bring back the music of his father, who left Cuba for good in 1959, never to return. But it was also a public mission, perhaps best exemplified during a workshop at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. At one point, he led the students in a chant: “Jazz no es norteamericano, es panamericano!” (Jazz is not North American, it is pan-American!)
As composer and pianist O’Farrill is very much his own man — listen to 2009’s “Risa Negra” (Zoho) for proof. As arranger and bandleader, he embodies his father’s intent: to celebrate the shared identity of Afro-Latin music and American jazz with originality and at the highest musical standards. With this orchestra as his instrument and supported by the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, he has upped the ante into something deeper and larger still. In younger years, Arturo O’Farrill, the son of legendary Cuban composer and bandleader Chico O’Farrill, ran away from his past. But once he stopped running, he found an open door to an expansive future.
On the evening of June 12, at Birdland, O’Farrill will host a benefit supporting music education for New York City youth, featuring his own quintet and the Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats, a pre-professional youth orchestra administered by the Alliance that holds its sessions at the Greenwich Village jazz club Fat Cat. Next May, O’Farrill will lead his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra as it performs his father’s classic composition, “Afro Latin Jazz Suite.” From Greenwich Village to midtown to Harlem and well beyond, O’Farrill’s tidy cottage keeps growing in the most generous and open-minded fashion — through education, advocacy, new-music commissioning, and artistry at a consistently high level — into the sort of castle Afro Latin tradition and New York City arts deserve.