Just a few years ago, the enormously influential composer-bandleader Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill considered himself the forgotten man of a musical genre he helped invent, Afro-Cuban jazz.
Though admired by music historians and praised by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Tito Puente — both beneficiaries of O’Farrill’s innovations — O’Farrill essentially had vanished from America’s musical radar. The man who had been at the vanguard of merging Afro-Cuban rhythm with American jazz harmony and phrasing in late 1940s New York hadn’t recorded an album under his own name for roughly 30 years. Worse, O’Farrill lacked a working band to perform his seminal compositions and to serve as a laboratory for new ones.
So no one was more surprised than O’Farrill to find himself back in the swing in 1995. His majestic recording “Pure Emotion” not only restored the composer to public view but snared a Grammy nomination and spawned two follow-up discs: “Heart of a Legend” and a new CD to be released next month.
Whether or not “Heart of a Legend” wins a Latin Grammy at next month’s awards ceremony in Los Angeles, the nomination affirms that O’Farrill is back, and with a vengeance. As he approaches his 79th birthday, he’s savoring the kind of delayed recognition that often eludes jazz masters until long after they’re gone.
“I was shocked,” says O’Farrill, with characteristic forthrightness, in recalling his reaction to the popular and critical acclaim that has been so late in arriving.
“When we were making the `Pure Emotion’ record I said to myself, `Who’s going to like this music today? It’s not rock ‘n’ roll.'”
But in an era when American audiences increasingly have become attuned to various forms of world music, O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban repertoire was poised to rise again.
The sensational commercial success of the “Buena Vista Social Club” movie and disc surely didn’t hurt, but the palpable nostalgia of the “Buena Vista” music stands at the opposite end of the Afro-Cuban spectrum.
If “Buena Vista” offered a luxuriant nostalgia trip into pre-Castro Cuban musical tradition, both “Heart of a Legend” and “Pure Emotion” attested to the contemporary tone, adventurous spirit and complex instrumental textures of O’Farrill’s best work.
Moreover, the man is a jazz musician to the core, preferring hard-charging orchestral charts ignited by brilliant horn solos to the genteel danzon and sweetly lyric son of his native Cuba. O’Farrill, in other words, didn’t merely export Cuban song forms to New York when he moved there in 1948. Rather, he re-energized American big-band conventions with the ferociously syncopated clave rhythms he heard since his youth in Cuba.
As if that weren’t enough, he conceived his Cuban-tinged jazz compositions on an epic scale, proving that the merger of American jazz and ancient Cuban rhythms could yield works as vast and imposing as masterworks by Beethoven or Brahms.
The achievement, widely acknowledged by connoisseurs, should become more apparent to the general public when O’Farrill’s newest disc is released. For the first time in decades, listeners will hear fresh recordings of O’Farrill’s behemoths, his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” and “Aztec Suite” of the 1950s. And the state-of-the-art recording technology, says O’Farrill, “lets you hear things that most people have never heard in recordings of this music.”
But if O’Farrill ranks with such Afro-Cuban titans as composer-arranger Mario Bauza, bandleader Machito and percussionist Chano Pozo, the riddle remains: Why has broader public recognition come so late?
“A big part of it is because Chico was not really a bandleader — he was a composer first and foremost,” says Arturo O’Farrill Jr., the composer’s son, collaborator and co-leader of Chico O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Jazz Big Band.
“His main gig was at the writing desk, and that’s why Chico never received the fame he deserved.”
Indeed, since Chico O’Farrill didn’t lead a famous band like Machito’s, didn’t attain the instrumental virtuosity of Pozo and didn’t develop a stage persona like Puente’s or Gillespie’s, he never really became an entertainment commodity in the U.S. Instead, O’Farrill penned compositions and arrangements that enabled others to bask in the spotlight.
But viewed in toto, his life’s work commands considerable stature.
For starters, O’Farrill helped codify the emerging Afro-Cuban jazz of the 1940s and ’50s. Because he had been schooled in the art of classical composition (by Felix Guerrero in Cuba and Stefan Wolpe and Hall Overton in New York), he was equipped to capture an emerging art form on paper. And with the encouragement of jazz producer Norman Granz, by 1950 O’Farrill was writing vast jazz suites, accomplishing in Afro-Cuban idioms what Duke Ellington was doing in magnificent extended works such as “Black, Brown and Beige,” “Deep South Suite” and “Liberian Suite.”
“To me, Chico’s contribution is that he’s the first real composer of Latin jazz,” says Arturo O’Farrill. “Not just because he used larger forms, but because he thinks like a composer. He deals with themes, motifs, tonal centers — the same issues that Beethoven dealt with in writing a piano concerto.”
But O’Farrill’s journey to this level of achievement was neither easy nor predictable. Born in Havana to a family with ancestry in Ireland (hence the unlikely surname), O’Farrill got into so much mischief as a youth that his parents sent him to the Riverside Military Academy in Georgia in the late 1930s, hoping he might shape up. Instead, he was seduced by American jazz.
“They sent me to military school to get some discipline, and they made a big mistake,” says O’Farrill, with a laugh. “Because that was where I heard the big bands for the first time. I heard Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and I fell in love with that music.
“When I went back to Cuba, I was supposed to go to study law in Havana. No hope for that.”
Uninspired by the older forms of Cuban music that dominated the island in his youth, O’Farrill moved to Manhattan in 1948 and immersed himself in the “Cubop” scene, collaborating with Machito, Pazo, Bauza, Gillespie and others in nurturing an explosive merger of Cuban rhythm and American bebop. Two years later, O’Farrill began penning monumental jazz works, including his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” (1950), “Second Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite”(1952), “Manteca Suite” (1954) and “Aztec Suite” (1959).
But the rise of Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s did not augur well for O’Farrill’s brand of music-making, and his assignments dried up with astonishing speed. By 1960 he was leading a band in Mexico, and even when he returned to New York, in 1965, he slipped into the anonymity of writing charts for the Count Basie band and cranking out TV and radio jingles.
Some observers have criticized O’Farrill for going the commercial route, with saxophonist-bandleader Paquito D’Rivera recently telling the Los Angeles Times, “I think Chico could have been another Ernesto Lecuona,” perhaps the pre-eminent Cuban composer of the 20th Century, “if he had decided to go that path. … But Chico spent too much time in the studios. I understand why he did it, because the money was very good, but he’s one of the most original of our Cuban musicians.”
O’Farrill’s son disagrees, however, that O’Farrill made the wrong move.
“My father was very happy to make the money, because we had some very lean years, some real economic duress,” says Arturo O’Farrill.
“Nobody wanted my father’s art music, so he did the other. It’s very hard to write without being asked to. But all the commercial music he wrote, it was all high quality.”
Nevertheless, Chico O’Farrill was watching his career as a jazz composer crumbling.
“Partially, I was sad about what was happening,” he says. “But partially I told myself, `Well, things change. Either you accept it and face it, or you do nothing.'”
At the very least, O’Farrill’s commercial work kept his writing-arranging chops in working order, so that when producer Todd Barkan hit on the idea of a comeback album in 1995, O’Farrill was raring to go. His third such disc should cement O’Farrill’s place back at the top of the jazz world.
Though the composer does not wax philosophical on the meaning of his re-emergence, preferring to focus on the music, his return to the spotlight is bittersweet, says his son.
“It’s a very emotional thing for him,” explains Arturo O’Farrill. “A lot of the music that is being recorded now really for the first time in his life is music he wrote a long time ago. And he gets very melancholic to hear it, because it reminds him of a younger place in his life.
“Also, while my father would never admit it, I believe he felt a little anger and embarrassment that the larger jazz community didn’t record him earlier.
“But, like everyone else, he’s grateful to be appreciated — even if it’s so late.”
