For approximately thirty minutes last week, I was on the road with jazz musician, composer and Arturo O’Farrill. The six-time Grammy Award winner was traveling from New York to Vermont. He estimated the drive should take five hours, but he was hoping to make it in four. I joined him by phone during his commute.
O’Farrill and I were talking about his new album, …dreaming of lions, his first for Blue Note Records. He is joined by The Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble for two works written for Malpaso Dance Company of Cuba. The album features two works O’Farrill composed: Despedida, inspired by a poem by Jorge Luis Borges and the title work which was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Tomorrow, October 13th, O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra begin a series of performances in California.
The first concert on Wednesday is at Stanford. The rest of his itinerary includes shows at UC Davis on the 14th, UC Santa Barbara on the 15th, The Soraya at UC Northridge on the 16th and The Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on October 17th.
We had a lively discussion about music, politics and legacies (he’s the son of legendary bandleader Chico O’Farrill and his sons, Zachary and Adam, are both making their own names as musicians.) What follows is nearly our entire conversation that has only been edited for length and clarity.
In a video for Malpaso Dance Company’s Dreaming of Lions, Fernando Saez Carvajal says “Music and dance are connected very much in Cuba to what we could consider cultural resistance.” What is your role, vis-a-vis this composition, in that cultural resistance?
I think that anytime you do any kind of activity with Cuba, you’re certainly casting a vote for an examination of the relationship between the two countries. I’m not particularly communist and I’m not particularly this or that of the other team, but I am definitely up for engagement. I’m pro engagement. We have to deal with several realities.
We have to deal with the reality that Cuba exists, that they pose absolutely no threat whatsoever to anything by either ideology or safety. Yet we punish these people in a cruel and criminal nightmare because they happen to be communists. Well, of course, we are happy to do business with China. We’re happy to do business with Saudi Arabia, which has a horrifying track record of killing journalists. We’re happy to do business with or be comfortable with Russia, but we’re somehow penalizing Cuba in a way that is vicious and cruel. So again, I’m not making a political statement. I’m not making an ideological statement. I’m simply saying that we need to examine what’s really happening here. So doing art with Cuba is very much a statement. So it’s not an endorsement of a political ideology, but it is. It’s also the source of my blood. I’m Cuban. I’m Cuban Mexican. And so working with this dance company is very much something that feels sacred to me. It’s a sacred obligation.
Do you think that the creation of music or any art is a political act?
I think that breathing is a political act, I do. I think that if you’re dating, something is political. If you are ignoring something that’s political. If you don’t openly speak against things that you think are wrong, if you don’t openly endorse things that you think are right, if you just stay silent – you’re being political. So I feel like making art that’s purposeful and that supports a viewpoint is important.
I get criticized all the time because people think artists should stay away from politics and they should stay away from making political statements. I actually had an incident at Birdland in New York. I talked about the confusion in Washington and some audience members yelled out “Shut up” before I could say anything. And somebody at the bar got angry. Of course, they have a right to speak and before I knew it there was kind of a yelling match going on while the band was playing. Well, I got offstage and was thanking the the club manager for quieting this dispute. And he said to me, “Mr O’Farrill, you should go in the dressing room because these people are outside doing the Nazi salute and saying, ‘Heil Hitler.'” Things have gotten to a point where by not actively speaking out against this kind of rhetoric you are actively supporting polarization. We need to speak clearly and cleanly to the idea that there is a lot of wrong in our society. And I think the job of the artist is, whether you write openly political music or not, the job of the artist is to accurately reflect the state of things in our world.
For a moment let’s leave politics behind and talk about the record. The two pieces that are on your album were composed for dance. What considerations did you have in writing this music knowing that it was going to be danced to and not just listened to?
Oh, it’s such a thrill to work with dancers and choreographers. The idea of setting music to a narrative has always been thrilling to me. The idea of setting it to a visual narrative, to a specific sequence of events and a visual, has radicalized the way I approach music. Meaning, I no longer make composition just abstract state. Even if I don’t have a narrative I think visually. I think architecturally when I write music. I really try to see movement even if it’s not for dance. That’s really changed my approach to making music. If I sit down to compose I see things. I see movement. I see shapes. And that kind of opens up a lot of possibilities for me as a composer.
What do you think the difference has been in the end result of what you’ve written?
I always appeal to the idea that you should write the things that interest you with the curiosity that you have. And so I think that hopefully, because I’m interested and curious about the process and the sounds that are coming out of my brain, people will also find interesting the structures and the drawings, if you will, that come out of my music. If you’re an honest artist you’ll compose or write what’s compelling to you. And if you do that, then you’re being honest to your craft. Hopefully people will go on that journey. You can make music to placate, you can make music to monetize, or you can make music because you’re curious about how this sounds or that works. When you do that there are people who are adventurous who will go with you on that adventure. Maybe not the vast majority of the listening public, but I still feel like your job is to take people on a journey and that’s sacred work.
These compositions debuted approximately five or six years ago. When it came time to recording this album did you make any adjustments, either in composition or arrangement, and if you did, why?
I opened it up to more improvisational settings because that’s the nature of jazz, and that’s the nature of who I am. I’m really an improviser and my musicians are improvisers. So we did open up some of the pieces, but they’re basically the same. In fact, I think they were greatly enhanced by the improvisational aspect. The structures of the pieces are, except for the addition of improvisational sections, exactly as we performed them with the dance company.
La Llorona is one of the most haunting pieces I’ve heard in a while.
Thank you. To have that piece was very powerful to me. I’m very socially and politically active and I deal a lot with victims of police killing. I’ve interacted a lot with with mothers who have their children, their sons’ lives, taken from them. That was the guiding principle in that piece. I was thinking directly about women who lost their children to violence.
I know that Despedida has farewells at its theme. Given what the world has gone through in the last 18 months, do you think this work has added resonance now?
Yes, I do. And it’s funny because sometimes I’ll write a work that’s premature. For instance, I wrote Four Questions with Cornel West and could not have told you that it would come out during Black Lives Matter. I could not have predicted that. And I could not have predicted that Despedida would come out during this horrifying year of fear. And it’s been a horrifying year.
I was just lamenting to my wife that we’ve lost so many heroes; the people, musicians that I adored and loved and looked up to and just assumed would be there forever. Our community was diminished greatly by the pandemic and just by the natural aging process. A lot of our musicians are aging and dying.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in two, three, five years from now and how everybody’s journey through this time influences how they choose to express themselves, particularly artists.
I agree. I love the idea of art being journalism. I think we’re going to be thinking about this a lot for years to come and the art that was made during this time period is going to be a lot about who we are and what we think.
You tackle two legends in this work with Borges and Hemingway. When you’re working with well-known works by these established writers as the inspiration for what you’re doing, how long are the shadows cast by these two men and their works on you?
Well, I mean, particularly with the Hemingway, I read that when I was a kid and for some reason it really resonated with me. I think it was because I was fairly young in this country. I had just come maybe three or five years earlier and I didn’t really quite feel like I fit in. One of the themes in the Hemingway work is really about alienation. He’s getting old, he’s passing. You know, he’s no longer useful. He gets the biggest fish of his life , but he can’t show it off because the shark ate it and he just stays wistful for another time.
All those things were really prevalent to me when I was a kid. I didn’t quite understand why I didn’t fit it. I didn’t quite understand why I was other. And so that book really hit hard. And so writing this work the themes that Hemingway deals with, I think are really germane to my life, my feelings when I was young – even now. And so the the impact that that literature had on me, you know, is measurable. And I pray that it’s a measure of justice to that.
You described yourself as an other. There’s been a lot of movement in the last year-and-a-half or two years about being more and having more inclusion in the arts. It seems to me that every group is being included except the Latino community – inclusion hasn’t made its way there yet. What are your thoughts are about where we are and what it might take for that inclusion to finally reach the Latino community.
There’s an ancient tale of woe between the Americas and the Latin America that is seen in such a subservient way by the North American and Anglo Americans. And I don’t understand it myself because, quite frankly, I think our cuisine is better. I think our music is better. But you know, that’s just me as I’m partial to that.
A lot of the problems that caused the Great Migration were also birthed by American interests. Let’s face it, we had our hands in a lot of mess that has resulted in people leaving their homes. Let’s not talk about El Salvador, let’s not talk about Nicaragua, let’s not talk about Panama. Let’s not talk about puppet dictatorships that we helped to politically aid. There are a lot of things that we’ve caused that have brought great migration to the North.
Latinos are not wholly vested. We’re not invited to the cultural table in the way that I think we merit, you know? But that’s okay. I’m not a dominant culture in this nation and I understand that. I may not want to be. Maybe I like being outside looking in, you know, there’s less responsibility in that. But I think it’s wrong.
I think that Latino culture is front and center in so many ways. We are purveyors of great food and dance and music and culture in this nation. Whether or not we’re accorded the credentials that mainstream society accords itself is secondary. We’re still going to prevail. We’re still going to do the work that we do at the highest level that we do. And you know, being on Blue Note, it’s such a huge honor to me because there’s been so few Latinos on Blue Note. Blue Note is the iconic label of jazz, it’s not just one, it’s the iconic label of jazz and I’m really proud to represent my people.
There was a story in the New York Times about 10 years ago, and you said at that time that you were able to let go of many ghosts of the past 10 years. What role, if any, do those ghosts play in your music and do you feel their presence in the work you’re doing now or even on this album?
If I’m not mistaken, I was referring to my father’s work and the different Latino artists that have come before me. The older I get the more I realize I don’t really want to lose touch with Machito and Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez. I am more in love with that music than ever. And I think that the stigma that I felt then was that we were expected to wave maracas and wear ruffled shirts and that somehow would lessen us. You know what? I’m proud of those maracas, I’m proud of those ruffled shirts. I’m proud of the work that these legendary heroes are part of.
The fact the Machito came to Harlem, saw Cab Calloway and Count Basie and said, I think I can do that. I’m proud of the fact that we’re innovators and we’re crazy enough to think that we can create music that’s a hybrid of so many things. So I think I may have changed my stance on that. I think I may actually feel now that I don’t want to exercise those ghosts, I’m proud of them.
The other day we did a concert on the same bill with Eddie Palmieri – that’s just about as heavy as it gets. And I got the privilege of sitting with him for half an hour in his dressing room and just shooting the breeze. But I realize that man had such a huge intellect and thinks so deeply about his music, who he is and where he’s from. It’s amazing to me that I come from such a beautiful musical legacy.
As do your sons, of course, who are who are musicians in their own right. What kind of guidance can you give them in navigating that relationship between the past and still keeping an eye on the future?
I’ve told them to always be proud of their father and their grandfather and their roots. I’ve taken them to Cuba. One of the first things I did was as soon as they were salient, I took them to Cuba to understand where they came from. I think it’s really important. I’ve told them whatever music they end up playing to be aware that their aesthetic was shaped by the music that they heard me play and they know their grandfather. Whether they’re playing modern jazz or Hip-Hop or whatever direction they go, they should really know and be proud of where they come from.
I’m also giving them some career advice. A freelance artist is a really harsh reality. So I told them don’t confuse your art with your identity, your human being. Your art stems from your humanity. But sometimes it’s so hard to make a living. You’re so aware of criticism and so aware of of the weight of making art that you can really let it eat you up.
I think the trick to all of this is to love life, to love friendships, to love the humanity of being here now, and that your art should spring from that. Both of my sons are noble, decent human beings with big, huge hearts. That makes me proud.
And it doesn’t hurt that they’re talented on top of it.
Well, I hope they’ll come visit us where we get older.
One more one more question for you, Arturo. Hemingway writes in The Old Man in the Sea, “Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky, but I would rather be exact then when luck comes you’re ready.” What’s your view of that idea and how do you approach every new day?
Every new day, this is true – it is not just rhetoric, I really spend a lot of time being introspective trying to figure out where I am fraudulent, where I am self-congratulatory, where I am not humble, where I’m hurting other people. I really do. I spend an awful lot of time thinking exactly about how I can be a better person. I actually do that.
It’s a little bit like the Five Agreements. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Five Agreements. Being true to your word, being as integral as you can be, integrity is really important, being honest.
That stuff is exact. And I really firmly believe that if if you do that kind of work, if you try hard to be exact and live with integrity, then you will be much richer.
Main Photo by Laura Mariet (Courtesy Unlimited Myles)