March 2015 – BLU NOTES
I’ll never forget the trip I took to Havana in 2010 with Arturo O’Farrill and his family, chronicled in a Village Voice cover story. At the start, I was focused on a very personal quest. As I wrote:

The dream was simple, really. Through the support of his Alliance organization, Arturo wanted to bring the orchestra he leads in his father’s name back to Cuba, which Chico left for good in 1959. He had toyed with the idea for some time, but it became a firm goal, a mission, in 2002, after his own first visit to Cuba. “I’m going to do this,” he’d told me toward the end of that trip. “And even though Chico never made it back to the island physically, his music will be played there. I feel like he’ll be there with us. The people will embrace his music. And somehow, to some degree, all will seem right with the universe to me for just a split-second.”

Yet by the end of trip O’Farrill’s focus, and mine, grew grander:

“I’ve been thinking long and hard about this,” Arturo said. “The reason I went was not to canonize my father. I did want to hear his music in Cuba and to see my mother there. But there’s another thing: I want jazz to stop dying this awful death, this strangulation. I think the future of this music has to do with the acceptance of a larger picture of it, which has always been the deeper truth anyway.”

Fresh off his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s second Grammy win, O’Farrill prepares for a landmark cross-cultural concert at Manhattan’s Symphony Space May 1 and 2, and readies his next CD, recorded in Cuba last year. Both are titled “The Conversation Continued,” which, O’Farrill told me, was inspired by the ending of my Voice piece:

“That final Sunday night in Havana, after the premiere of his new piece, the Mella’s massive brown curtain drew slowly shut, until finally only Arturo was visible. He was speechless. He simply waved. The curtain closed. The door had been thrown open, the larger conversation to come.”