• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 01 / 13 / 2011

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BY Maite Junco.DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER.Wednesday, January 12th 2011, 4:00 AM.Arturo O'Farrill measures his words carefully.

"I want to make a point of this in a very friendly matter because everybody, of course, knows about Wynton's trip," the New York pianist, composer and bandleader says. "But we've been planning this trip since 2002."

O'Farrill is referring to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis' historic trip to Havana with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in October, which received extensive media coverage, including a recent segment on "60 Minutes."

The 50-year-old O'Farrill, who also was once part of Jazz at Lincoln Center, took a similar, if more personal, journey last month. He went with his family and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, the 18-piece band founded by his famous father, legendary Cuban composer and arranger Chico O'Farrill.

"Even though I was born in Mexico, my heart is always very emotional when I go," he says about traveling to Cuba, his fifth trip since 2002 but only his second to perform there. "It feels like a return."

The Grammy winner, who has been playing Sundays at Birdland for 15 years, will speak about his Cuban experience next Thursday, Jan. 20, at an Afro-Latin jazz session he's hosting at Symphony Space. Guests are encouraged to bring their instruments.

Like Marsalis, O'Farrill held workshops in Cuba for music students at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory and performed accompanied by young local musicians and master pianist Chucho Valdés.

O'Farrill says his mission was also to reconnect the spirit of his father, who died in 2001 without having returned to Cuba, with the island.

"We went there to thank the Cuban people and the nation of Cuba for giving us one of their sons, who went out and changed the course of history in music," he explains.

Chico O'Farrill was a key part of the birth of Afro-Cuban jazz and the composer in 1950 of one of the genre's landmark works, the Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite.

"Jazz and Cuba are inexorably tied together, it's not a branch from a tree," says O'Farrill. "Latin music is part of the root of jazz."

O'Farrill also traveled to Varadero, Cuba, to perform with an orchestra that plays almost exclusively his father's work. But the group, unable to get their hands on music sheets, had been transcribing it from albums.

"We made a gift to them of six original pieces of Chico with scores and parts," he says. "It was a very emotional moment for them and for us."

The composer took to Cuba not only the band but his Mexican mom, an upper West Sider making her first trip back to Cuba since her and O'Farrill's father left the island for good in the late '50s, his wife and two musician sons.

"It was like being in a rollercoaster ride," he says.

The week-long visit, sponsored by O'Farrill's three-year-old nonprofit, the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, is part of a growing cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Communist island after decades of hostility.

Marsalis stayed away from politics during his visit, which O'Farrill described as "incredible" and "hugely important," but the pianist didn't shy away, wanting to address the angry correspondence he gets from Cuban-American artists when he visits the Communist island.

"We overlook crimes against humanity in many nations that we do business with and even our own political prisoners," said O'Farrill. "When we go to Cuba we are not condoning any particular goverment but we are celebrating the things that we share as human beings."

O'Farrill wrapped up his stay with a concert that closed the 26th edition of the Jazz Plaza Festival at the Mella Theater. His composition "Fathers and Sons From Havana to New York and Back" had its premiere there.

"The piece was performed with our guest Chucho Valdés, my sons, Chico's grandchildren performing on trumpet and drum, and six young Cuban musicians," he said.

"They stood on stage, playing together, and beaming and hugging and high-fiving and laughing, and for a minute there was no embargo. For a minute there was no wall. There was only love and music and family."

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Source: //www.nydailynews.com/latino/2011/01/12/