Bringing Chico Home

In Cuba, NYC Pianist Arturo O’Farrill Finds Himself, Honors His Father, and Pushes Past Politics.

By Larry Blumenfeld – The Village Voice – February 23, 2011

On the final night of the Havana International Jazz Festival, the Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra played an emotional set at the Mella Theater.

When the steel door to Kennedy Airport’s Gate 8 slammed shut, Arturo O’Farrill was on the wrong side. With his wife, sons, and mother in tow one Monday in December, he was bound for Miami, then for Havana via charter flight. And though far from early, the O’Farrills weren’t exactly late-the plane began rolling toward the runway 10 minutes ahead of schedule. Inside the cabin of American Airlines Flight 1141, Eric Oberstein-the earnest, babyfaced executive director of O’Farrill’s four-year-old nonprofit organization, the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance-asserted himself.

“You’ve got a Grammy-winning pianist and his family out there waiting to get on this plane,” he pleaded to the crew. “All 18 of the musicians in his orchestra are here. . . . He’s waited eight years for this trip, worked with the American and Cuban governments . . . headlining the Havana Jazz Festival . . . bringing his father’s music back to Cuba. . . .”

None of it worked. Off the plane went, with a faint apology from a flight attendant. Out on the next flight, Arturo made it to Miami in time, his family intact: his wife, Alison, a classical pianist; his two sons, 19-year-old drummer Zack and 16-year-old trumpeter Adam; and his mom, Lupe, the widow of Chico O’Farrill, a Cuban-born composer, arranger, bandleader, and longtime New York resident who was a towering musical figure in both places. Arturo shrugged off the airport fiasco. It was just the latest and, frankly, the least forbidding of doors to slam in his face.

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.”

Read the full article at www.villagevoice.com

Tiempo Libre – Bach in Havana (Sony Classical 2009)

The title of this record – Bach in Havana – should not come as a surprise, after all there is a yet-to-be-fully-discovered European Baroque and Classical music tradition that bubbles and boils in conservatories just barely under the skin of Cuban life, nestling cheek-by jowl with Santeria worship. This culture is very real and continues to turn out a stunning number of brilliant musicians year after year. Still the title surprises. Before a single note can be heard that is. Put that together with the name of the band, Tiempo Libre, a title that itself suggests a very free, almost avant garde force and you have a delightful, but perplexing conundrum. Perhaps it is this very anomaly that gives superlative credence to the music on this record. But finally there is, of course, the fact that a so-called “Third Stream” – music that fused jazz and music from the Western classical, romantic and baroque traditions that was already established in the early 1950s by the legendary band, the Modern Jazz Quartet.

In the face of the myriad of records documenting the collision between two musical traditions – classical and jazz – would any new attempt to redefine a relationship between – now- Afro-Cuban music and classical baroque music and that too Johann Sebastian Bach create a destructive deconstruction of both musics. Or would it in fact elevate all music to a vastly different level? On the musical evidence from this record, the latter is true. This is a landmark recording in the sense that Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) was approximately fifty years ago. What that Miles Davis record did for music was to establish beyond doubt that the hallmark of the high art of Afro-American music was its explosive creative spontaneity. This could make its mark even without the confines of written form, because its blues was form itself. Its emotion gave it form and raison d’etre. ‘Nuff said!

Now with Bach in Havana this is a vastly different challenge for the musicians on the session. Granted that by his own admission, Jorge Gomez, the Musical Director of Tiempo Libre, remembers often hearing his father play a Prelude or a Fugue from Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier,” what Robert Schumann called “this work of works’, the brilliant baroque exegesis. Granted… also that classical music is still de rigueur in the hallowed halls of Cuba’s conservatories… But to turn around and create an explosive meeting of the ancient Afro-Cuban music – that music which pulsates with Yoruban worship – and the secular or sacred music of Bach’s great music, both small and large landscape… This is nothing short of miraculous.

First, Bach: It is now legion that he enriched the prevailing German Style of music with robust contrapuntal technique an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organization in composition for diverse instrumentation. He also adapted rhythms and textures from foreign music – notably Italy and France. And, of course, Bach’s works were revered for their intellectual depth, technical depth and artistic beauty. Now what about the Afro-Cuban tradition? Probably born at the dawn of time it is primal, rocks with the vitality of life itself. At its bedrock is a tantalizingly complex polyrhythmic structure that is sometimes so mesmerizing that its musicians swear that there are rhythms even within melodies. Over the years this music evolved into a complex tradition bombarded with influences from the western Caribbean, from Jazz from the North of America, formal dance forms of Spain and France and above everything else – all of this melded in a cauldron boiling over with the batá rhythms that invoked the names of the saints in a battery of invocations… Santeria!

Thus, Bach in Havana is more than just a collision of two ancient-modern traditions. It is a coming together of what appears to be kindred spirits that no one would have known existed. It is a reinvention of musical idioms in a confluence of form. Among the easier and more accessible ones is “Air on a G String,” (Orchestral Suite in D Minor), which becomes a motivically a bolero , but where idiomatic phrases and sonic metaphors are gleefully intertwined and sewn together with superlative percussion under the “Air” itself, and then of course the wild cadenza from the incredible Paquito D’Rivera. There is plenty more of this kind of cultural collision that produces the most exquisite examples of Bach in Clave, so to speak. Not the least is a Gavotte (Bach’s French Suite in C Minor) that reincarnates into a Son with Paquito dazzling on alto saxophone yet again. And also the Minuet in G re-cast as a Guaguancó, this time featuring the amazing Yosvany Terry on alto saxophone.

But nothing compares with the daring re-interpretation of Bach’s majestic “French Suite in C Minor” and its appearance as the shape-shifting “Mi Orisha” virtually a spiritual communion as Yosvany Terry achieves near spiritual bliss with his shuffling, shuttering invocations on the shekere. Similarly, “Olas de Yemayá” brings the batá gracefully onto the Bach “Prelude in C Major “and there is much more in “Timbach” an exegesis on “Prelude in D Minor”. Finally the crowning moments are in the gloriously edifying “Kyrie,” where Tiempo Libre brings an inspired Bata and its rag-a-tag-a-tag to the most revered of spiritual masterpieces – Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

Does all this extraordinary work on the record work? Does it really work? This is going to be debated for a while. In the end, the real truth will prevail. Bach in Havana is going to be held up as one that made an enormous creative leap just as Miles Davis’ did when he, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley blew those choruses on Kind of Blue.

Track listing: Tu Conga Bach – Conga (Fugue in C Minor); Fuga – Cha-cha-cha (Sonata in D Minor); Air on a G String – Bolero (Orchestral Suite in D Major); Clave in C Minor – Guaguancó (Prelude in C Minor); Gavotte – Son (French Suite in G Major); Mi Orisha – 6/8 Bata (French Suite in C Minor); Minuet in G – Guaguancó; Olas de Yemayá – Batá (Prelude in C Major); Baqueteo Con Bajo – Danzon (Cello Suite No.1); Timbach – Timba (Prelude in D Major); Kyrie – Batá (Mass in B Minor).

Personnel: Jorge Gomez: keyboards, background vocals, Music Director and arranger; Joaquin “El Kid” Diaz: lead vocals, batá; Leandro Gonzalez: congas, percussion, batá, background vocals; Tebelio “Tony” Fonte: electric bass, chapman stick, background vocals; Cristobal Ferrer Garcia: trumpet, trombone, background vocals; Hilario Bell: percussion, timbales, batá, background voice; Luis “Rosca” Beltran Castillo: tenor saxophone, guiro, background vocals.

Featuring: Paquito D’Rivera: alto saxophone on tracks 3, 5 and clarinet on track 9; Yosvany Terry: shekeré on track 6, alto saxophone on track 7.

Tiempo Libre on the web: www.tiempolibremusic.com

Review written by: Raul da Gama