Afro-Cuban Jazz

IF there is such a thing as a first family of Afro-Cuban jazz, the O’Farrill clan has a right to claim that distinction. Its members helped invent the hybrid genre back in the 1940s, when Chico O’Farrill came to New York from Havana, and in recent years they have worked to reinvigorate the music despite barriers in both Cuba and the United States. “We’re kind of people caught between two worlds,” said the pianist Arturo O’Farrill, Chico’s 50-year-old son. As such, he added, it’s his obligation to encourage “an evolving relationship between two countries that should never have been separated culturally” and to “pay a debt forward” in his father’s name.

I've long wondered about the name itself: Irish? 

The musical story of the family, which immigrated to Cuba from the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat in the 1700s, begins with Chico, who was studying at a military academy in Georgia in the mid-1930s when he fell in love with jazz. A decade later, after playing trumpet in Cuban orchestras, he moved to New York, where he quickly became an A-list composer and arranger, working with Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Count Basie and Machito, among others.

The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite is one of the greatest musical compositions I have ever heard, especially when it features Bird.

“Simply put, Chico O’Farrill is the greatest Afro-Cuban jazz figure of all time,” Leonardo Acosta, the author of “Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” said in a telephone interview from Havana. “His way of using the orchestra as an instrument, his ability as an arranger and composer and his skill in converting Cuban music into jazz and vice versa gives his work a kind of chemistry that no one else, neither Cuban nor American, has. He achieves another dimension.”

Arturo  on YouTube.