Arturo O'Farrill

Arturo O'Farrill is a New York-based jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and leader of the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. The son of big-band leader Chico O'Farrill, Arturo served with the Carla Bley Band, Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Turre, and Lester Bowie before leading the Chico O’Farrill Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra. In 2008, his orchestra issued the Grammy Award-winning studio album Song for Chico. 2014′s Final Night at Birdland and 2015′s The Offense of the Drum also won Grammys. Recorded in Havana, 2015′s Cuba: The Conversation Continues was nominated for a Grammy. The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra returned with Fandango at the Wall in 2018, followed by Four Questions in 2020 and Dreaming in Lions in 2021, on Blue Note. In 2022, O'Farrill issued The Centennial Suites, and followed with an uncharacteristic piano trio/solo outing titled Legacies, his Blue Note solo debut, in 2023.
Arturo O'Farrill was born in Mexico City in 1960 and raised in New York City. The son of Cuban big-band leader Chico O'Farrill, he was educated at the Manhattan School of Music and the Brooklyn College Conservatory. From 1979 to 1984, he played piano with the Carla Bley Big Band. Arturo then went on to develop his skills as a solo performer with a wide spectrum of artists, including Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Turre, Papo Vazquez, the Fort Apache Band, Lester Bowie, and Harry Belafonte.
In 1995, he agreed to direct Chico O’Farrill’s Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra in residence at New York City’s Birdland nightclub; the band also performed throughout the world. Arturo was a special guest soloist at three landmark Jazz at the Lincoln Center concerts: Afro-Cuban Jazz: Chico O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra (November 1995), Con Alma: The Latin Tinge in Big Band Jazz (September 1998), and Jazz at the Lincoln Center Gala: The Spirit of Tito Puente (November 2001) just months after Chico’s death.
As a bandleader in his own right, O'Farrill recorded material for Milestone Records, 32 Jazz, and M & I. Those releases (Blood Lines in 1999 and A Night in Tunisia in 2000) provided listeners with an overview of the musical environment in which O'Farrill was raised. In 2005, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra with Arturo O'Farrill released the Grammy-nominated Una Noche Inolvidable. He also made appearances on Habanera with Alberto Shiroma and the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed movie Calle 54.
The year 2008 saw him partnering with vocalist Claudia Acuña for In These Shoes, a stylish offering of jazz, Latin, and Brazilian music. Two years later, he released The Auction Project, featuring David Bixler, an acoustic post-bop date with a Celtic influence. In February 2011, he followed with 40 Acres and a Burro, an outing for the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. A solo piano date titled The Noguchi Sessions appeared later in 2011; for that album, O'Farrill was recorded alone after-hours at the Noguchi Museum on Long Island.
As a producer, he helmed the sessions for Adam Kromelow’s Youngblood album and participated in a quartet known as the Puppeteers with Jaime Affoumado, Bill Ware, and Alex Blake. Their self-titled album arrived in March 2014. O'Farrill followed it in May with the release of his next Afro-Latin Orchestra, The Offense of the Drum and Final Night at Birdland. Both albums took home Grammy Awards the following year in different categories.
In December 2014, O’Farrill and the band were in Cuba performing and planning to record. The next evening, President Barack Obama announced the restoration of full diplomatic relations with the nation after more than 50 years of silence. The album O'Farrill had planned was in synchronicity with the announcement: it extended the musical and cultural conversation begun by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo in the 1940s and featured four premier Cuban and six American composers/arrangers. The big band was expanded to accommodate 24 players. Its recording sessions included 21 producers and a number of videographers from both countries. The double-length document, entitled Cuba: The Conversation Continues, was released by Motema in mid-2015.
Two years later, O'Farrill paired with Chucho Valdés for Familia: Tribute to Bebo & Chico, an homage to their legendary fathers and shared musical legacies. In 2018, O'Farrill’s orchestra wrote and recorded a score for Kabir Sehgal’s book Fandango at the Wall: Creating Harmony Between the United States and Mexico; they released it as a stand-alone album and produced a documentary film for HBO. They followed with the Grammy-winning Four Questions in 2020.
As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, O'Farrill and his orchestra grew restless. He wrote ten new compositions, wrote charts, demoed them, and emailed them to his bandmates. The ensemble rehearsed across internet video from the remote destination of their individual living rooms. They recorded that way, too, and emerged with Virtual Birdland, released by Zoho, in February 2021.
O'Farrill signed the orchestra to Blue Note that year and re-entered the studio quickly with a tentet billed as the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble. They released the album Dreaming in Lions that September. Titled after Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, one of his favorite novels as a child, O'Farrill composed the set’s two multi-movement suites (the other is “Despedida”) in collaboration with the Malpaso Dance Company of Cuba.
In June 2022, Zoho released Centennial Suites, composed of archival material. It consisted of the four-movement “Afro Latin Jazz Suite,” recorded in a Havana studio in December 2014, and the original recording of “Four Questions,” begun in a New York studio in 2018 and completed in 2021. In September, Fandango at the Wall in New York appeared on Zozo as the final chapter in O'Farrill’s project. Much of the set was recorded live for a crowd of 5,000.
When O’Farrrill signed his orchestra to Blue Note, he also dotted the line on a solo contract. In April 2023, he released Legacies; the nine-track set offered eight jazz standards by composers such as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, and Carla Bley, as well as the original composition “Blue State Blues.” The track sequence alternated between performing with a piano trio (with bassist Liany Mateo and drummer/son Zack O’Farrill) and solo. ~ Paula Edelstein & Thom Jurek