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.

Imprisoned by Clichés, Laments and Exposition

Jorge Martín's opera "Before Night Falls" given its premiere recently by the Fort Worth Opera, is based on the memoir by the dissident Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Tortured and imprisoned by the Castro regime, Arenas was forced to repudiate his writings and his identity as a gay man; a few years after escaping to New York in the Mariel boatlift, he was stricken with AIDS and committed suicide. It's a subject with great possibilities, but Mr. Martín, who wrote his own libretto in collaboration with the memoir's translator, Dolores M. Koch, outlines the story without really making the audience live it. The Arenas character, Rey, is onstage for every scene of its 2½ hours of music, singing about his suffering, but it's never clear what it was that he wrote that was so threatening to the regime. And as lament follows lament, Rey never seems to change.

More than Communists, Cubans in power and with influence are machos, and homosexuality is not accepted.

Most of the opera is exposition and lamentation without dramatic tension, so it's a relief when an actual antagonist—Victor, the Castro hardliner—finally starts torturing Rey by burning his manuscript and knocking him around in prison. The most dramatic moment comes when Victor forces Rey to watch a television broadcast of Ovidio, Rey's mentor, denouncing his own writing and that of his friends, including Rey. And although one of Rey's greatest crimes in Cuba was to be homosexual, that fact, though much talked about, gets little expression, except in two gauzily homoerotic group ballets (cue those harp glissandos). Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of Fort Worth, we never see Rey in a love relationship with a man.

Forth Worth sensibilities?