When jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill founded the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra at Lincoln Center in New York City almost 25 years ago, it might have seemed like O’Farrill had embraced a musical destiny to which he’d been born.
His father, Chico O’Farrill, had immigrated from Cuba to New York City in the 1940s, arranging jazz scores for big band leaders such as Benny Goodman and Count Basie and jazz stars including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
By the mid-1950s, Chico O’Farrill was leading his own big band, the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, with which he played and recorded until his death at 79 in 2001.
But for Arturo O’Farrill, 66, who arrives in Costa Mesa this month as the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the family business held no interest to him as a teenager embarking on his own career in jazz.
“It’s funny. It’s an interesting story because I think that part of it has to do with something that a lot of people may be able to relate to,” O’Farrill says of turning away from the music of his father for years.
“I came to New York City, and I was the only Latino I knew, let alone the only Mexican,” he says of arriving there from Mexico City in 1965 when he was four or five years old. “So trying to fit in was difficult because my parents had accents. They spoke funny. They ate different food.
“All my friends were Anglo-Saxon people from the neighborhood,” O’Farrill says. “I didn’t fit in. The only Latino I knew was our [building] superintendent. I felt weird.”
So even as his own journey into jazz began, he rejected the jazz of his father, something he says was important to him as it is to many young adults.
“I think every child should reject roundly whatever their parents teach them, or whatever they hear from them, and reappropriate it,” O’Farrill says on a recent phone call. “We must all reexamine with our own critical faculties what we’re taught, what we’re exposed to, and what we’re shown.
“It wasn’t just that I wanted to play American jazz; I wanted to play spoken word. I wanted to explore all kinds of things. My first experiences with music were free jazz.”
One of his earliest mentors and bandleaders was Carla Bley, a major figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, and that suited O’Farrill fine, given its distance from the Cuban-tinged big band jazz of Chico O’Farrill’s life on stage.
Then one day, bassist Andy González, who cofounded the Fort Apache band with his brother Jerry, sat down with O’Farrill to deliver some truth.
“He said, ‘Man, I’m a big fan, but you have to explore your roots,’” O’Farrill says. “And that was the best moment for me. He sat me down and taught me my music from Peruchín to Charlie and Eddie Palmieri to Edsel Gomez.
“And man, I discovered that the music that I thought was other, because I felt othered when I was little, was actually a proud and very indigenous part of the American story,” he continues. “I discovered that, man, what we do is beautiful and complex and powerful, and I have to reexamine my different communities.
“Bill Evans spoke of jazz as beyond a ‘what’ but a ‘how.’ How we deal with life. How we deal with reality. And I find that Latin music is the same. In fact, maybe all music is a way to cope with who we are and how we got here.
“So I found a very, very, very great source of pride in the roots of the music I call jazz,” O’Farrill says. “Which are Latino, which are indigenous, which are pan-global.”
O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra kick off his year of residency as well as Segerstrom’s ¡VIVA! The Spenuzza Series with a concert on Saturday, Sept. 19, at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, O’Farrill talked about his plans as Segerstrom’s artist in residence, why his jazz orchestra widened the musical palette of his father’s, and more.
Q: How do you understand the job description of artist in residence at Segerstrom?
A: I really want to immerse myself in as much of the lives of the people that I have access to there. I know it’s a really diverse community. It’s an older community in terms of planting its roots in California. I feel like the job of artists in residence is not to come and have an agenda, but to come and really get a sense of what a place would be interested in having there.
We have a vast repertoire over close to 19 years of having the orchestra. We’ve interacted with musicians from all over the planet, from Kuwait to Veracruz. We just finished doing the Afro-Taiwanese concert [in August in Flushing, Queens].
So I have a repertoire of music that I think will fit some of the aesthetic and cultural interests of the people of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. We’re able to play something that everyone can relate to from some part of their background and journey.
Q: In addition to the kickoff concert, the tentpole events include Copacabana Nights in February and Rumba Para Monk Revisited in April.
A: The Copacabana will be a celebration of dancing and Palladium-style merrymaking. But I want to really reflect this West Coast sense of what mambo is. We have a very firm idea of what Latin music, mambo, and Palladium nights are. These thoughts were formed by our understanding of the mambo era, which is largely East Coast-based.
But that’s not true. There has always been a West Coast Latin movement. So one of the things I want to do is work with musicians in Southern California. For the Copacabana kind of dance celebration, we’re going to definitely bring a West Coast edge to the celebration of mambo.
And then Rumba Para Monk is kind of a celebration, a reinterpretation of one of the great modern Latin jazz records, which is called Rumba Para Monk by Jerry González and the Fort Apache Band.
We are right to celebrate Miles Davis. We are right to celebrate that part of history. But Latin people had a very, very deep and profound understanding of modern jazz as well. And one of the greatest expressions of that celebration is the love affair that I have, and that Jerry González and many Latin musicians have, with [Thelonius] Monk.
Because of Monk’s approach rhythmically to the music, and of the music he composed and the improvisations he played, he really resembles rumba and rumbero. The way he got up off the piano and danced, the way his compositions work, they really reflect the Afro-Cuban aesthetic.
I don’t know if he did that knowingly or it would just happen to be part of the language he used, but in a very real way, ‘Rumba Para Monk’ is a beautiful recasting of the understanding we have of jazz. Which is that it is actually an inheritance of Africa that was expressed, brought to many places in the Americas, not just New Orleans.
Q: It caught my attention that your orchestra is Afro-Latin, where your father’s was Afro-Cuban. To bring in more sounds and rhythms?
A: Yeah, absolutely. When Wynton [Marsalis, managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center] asked me to create an Afro-Cuban jazz orchestra for Lincoln Center, to be a sister orchestra to the Lincoln Center jazz orchestra, well, obviously that’s a huge honor.
But I also thought it was time, and I think Wynton understands this, because Dizzy understood this, because Louis Armstrong understood this, the state of the art for the introduction of Latin into jazz at the time that it happened was Cuba. You know, Dizzy became friends with Chano Pozo, and they were playing the same music, except from different angles.
These are different times. The state of the art is very different. The world of Latin is now fully pan-American as we saw with the Bad Bunny telecast on the Super Bowl. In a way, you can call me the Bad Bunny of jazz. I feel like Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico- these all have their entry points into the language of jazz.
We are going to really understand how jazz and Latin are intertwined. We have to respect the fact that this can no longer just be Afro-Cuban. In fact, I have a funny little story to tell you.
Q. What’s that?
One of the breakout points for me that won a Grammy was a record I wrote called “The Offense of the Drum.” And one of the things we do on it is bring in jazz master Donald Harrison [the noted New Orleans jazz saxophonist] to do “Iko Iko” with us. He was warming up in the studio as we were finishing mixing a piece called “Mercado en Domingo,” which was a Colombian piece composed by a gentleman named Pablo Mayor.
And it’s based on a very Colombian rhythm called porro. As Donald was getting ready to start his session, he looked at me and said, “Hey, is that second line?” [a traditional New Orleans jazz style] He said, “You sound like New Orleans.” I said, “No, my brother, that is from Colombia. It’s called porro, and it’s the street music of Bogota.”
And it was instantaneous in both our hearts, immediately understanding that the music of Africa permeated all of the Americas and touched all of our hearts, and resulted in this incredible thing called jazz, porro, mambo, whatever you want to call these things. I love that. I love that we are closer than the definitions of this style or that genre.
Q: Your father was Cuban; your mother was Mexican. I wonder how she influenced your life as a musician?
A: It’s funny because I feel without a doubt there’s such a contrast between Mexican and Cuban culture. For me, the presence of my mother, my grandmother, was much more maternal, a gentler spirit than in the presence of my Cuban side. So I’ve actually become a very nuanced person in terms of what I think music is. I don’t think music is for display. I think music is for building community.
And so I’ve devoted my life really to serving as many as I can, and I really believe that comes from my mother. She was an arts therapist in a nursing home and gave unselfishly of herself.
So, for instance, I started a non-profit 19 years ago called Afro Latin Jazz Alliance. We started serving children, teaching, sharing, creating community. And that grew and grew and grew to the point where we now are building a culture hub in Harlem. We’re building a 29,00-square-foot culture hub with a theater and cafe and jazz club and teaching areas. That to me is more the Mexico side than the Cuba side.
Q: Do you have access to your extended family in Cuba despite the embargoes and blockades?
A: Absolutely. One of the tragedies, I think, of my father’s final years, is that he was never able to return home. And he died a broken man because of it. In the years since, I’ve been able to visit Cuba many, many times. I’m not standing for the revolution or for the American side of things. But I have to say, there’s a lot of misinformation about what the revolution did for the people of Cuba.
It actually set them free very much in a way that we can understand, and I love what Cuba has done, and I’m fiercely protective. Again, I’m not speaking politics. I’m going to get the hate mail, I always do, but I’m not speaking politics. I’m speaking of the resilience and ingenuity of a people who are driven by the culture, education, love of family, love of home. And the kind of ingenious way that they’ve managed to survive.
Q: Segerstrom is expanding its programming on Latino culture, which is great because we have a huge Latino population. But not all fine arts institutions in the United States do that. How do you see how these things might fit together here or anywhere?
A: I think it’s incredible the Segerstrom is choosing to do this. I think, I hope, they set a standard and a bar for institutions that will follow. That will realize that Latino culture is a huge part of the United States. We’ve been here. We’re part of each other without a doubt.
And without a doubt, the Segerstrom is doing some cutting-edge thinking outside the box.