Afro-Cuban jazz legend to perform at Baldwin

Arturo O’Farrill, the son of Afro-Cuban jazz bandleader Chico O'Farrill, has built a career and legacy from working with diverse sounds, from Afro-Cuban jazz itself to far-out experiments with almost every singular instrument you can imagine. This Friday, he will play in Baldwin Auditorium with the Duke Jazz, Afro Cuban & Djembe ensembles.

“I want the audience to scream, take off their shoes and run around,” O’ Farrill said. “It’s too bad Baldwin doesn’t have a dance floor anymore. They’ll have to use the aisles. But they absolutely can’t sit quietly in their seats. It’s just not going to be that type of performance.”

As the founder of New York’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, O’Farrill works primarily to honor the tradition of Afro-Latin jazz, a genre rooted in Havana and NYC clubs in the mid-twentieth century. The genre is characterized by collaborations between innovators in both jazz, the great American musical tradition and Cuban percussionists, whose arrival in New York City heralded a turning point in jazz. Jazz musicians, who had already embraced improvisation, were then able to draw rhythms from older Latin American and African musical traditions.

“I’ve mixed bagpipes with turntables,” O’Farrill said. “The genre doesn’t matter. I look for music with flexibility and openness.”

This weekend’s concert will feature classic jazz fusion standards from the 1940’s and 1950’s, the era in which jazz great Dizzy Gillespie met Chano Pozo, a Cuban immigrant already legendary for his drumming and singing during the Carnival season. Together they created classic fusions of Latin music’s patterns and percussion with the instruments and improvisations of American jazz. Within this fusion, it’s difficult and almost counterproductive to decipher which component belongs to each tradition.

“Jazz is just not jazz without a Latin tinge,” Bradley Simmons, director of the Duke Djembe ensemble, said. “Percussion makes jazz what it is.”

As the director of Duke Djembe, he knows the power of percussion instruments, particularly the goblet-shaped West African djembe drums, which musicians play barehanded.

On Friday, Simmons and the Djembe ensemble will be joining Arturo O’Farill and Carlos Maldonado, the percussionist for O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. The Duke Jazz Ensemble, a group of undergraduates led by John Brown, will also participate. As these groups come together for a final week of practices leading up to the concert, none seem overly perturbed by the challenge of melding together the many parts of a big band.