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DAN OUELLETTE'S JAZZ & BEYOND INTEL Jazz & Beyond Intel: Activist Bandleader Arturo O’Farrill, Livestreaming Pioneers Ramsey Lewis & Emmet Cohen, VU’s Lou Reed, Three-Dot Lounge Heroes: JFA shem.gif June 2020 ARTURO O’FARRILL: ACTIVIST BANDLEADER On March 11, Arturo O’Farrill was looking ahead to four months of work. The next day, all his shows were cancelled due to the oncoming coronavirus pandemic. “I thought, what am I going to do, ” says the bicoastal bandleader/educator/philosopher from his stay-at-home shelter in Los Angeles. “Well, I never had been this busy.” Top of the list to do was to create his “Virtual Birdland” project. Through online connections, Arturo assembles his 18-piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra that had been playing weekly at the New York club. It’s a four-day recording and editing session. Meanwhile Arturo has been trying his best to promote his compelling new album Four Questions (ZoHo Records) that proves to be prophetic, speaking to the protest marches that have proliferated stateside and internationally since George Floyd was brutally killed by police officers in Minneapolis. At the core of the album, which features for the first time all of Arturo’s compositions, is the title concerto featuring Dr. Cornel West’s impassioned and angry speech on the social and political forces at work in our homeland. Arturo writes in the liners: “Watching Dr. West speak is one of the sublime musical experiences of my life. His oratory has the weight of a John Coltrane solo. His rhythmic delivery has the tumbao of Mongo Santamaria. The humor with which he injects his very serious messages floats like Charlie Parker in flight. And, oh, most sacred of all, when he gets deliberate, each word has the authenticity and Afrocentricity of Thelonious Monk’s right hand.” The piece is so powerful, poignant and truthful that it would seem perfect for airplay on jazz radio for today’s roused-up social world. But the sad reality is that most jazz radio stays away from controversy, Arturo opines, and they stick to their diet of very safe jazz. “I don’t even think WBGO [in Newark] has ever played music by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, ” he adds. Four Questions continues the arc of Arturo’s career as an activist with his music. He favors the word and harks back to the lessons he learned from his dad, the legendary composer and band leader Chico O’Farrill. “I believe that we must act out our convictions, ” he says. “As musicians we’re often seen as being timid, but when we get together, we talk politics. I learned that you have to speak your mind. Chico was a troublemaker and a malcontent. The whole message of my album is about my malcontentness.” A longtime Brooklyn resident, Arturo set up home part-time in Los Angeles when he was hired in 2019 to be a professor in the Global Studies Department at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. Soon after arriving he was named an associative dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Perfect for the times. “I think they tapped me for this because I have a big month, ” he says. “The school has a lot of whites and Asians. So, I’m saying, hold on, what about blacks and Latinos? So we’re setting out to make the jazz department more global and making a huge contribution to jazz education—extending the definition of jazz. And we have to understand the full history of jazz. We teach music, but we also have to teach about people who died to make this music—whether it was the black community on Philadelphia or the old stockades in Cuba where the African slaves were shackled in chains if they tried to run away.” In the meantime while the school campus is shut down, Arturo ‘s Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance has set up a crowd-funding project to help out New York and New Jersey artists who are facing economic catastrophe from the epidemic. At the moment, it has raised $47, 500 to be dispersed to applicants seeking funds. “We review everyone who applies, and I’ve been surprised by some names who are excellent artists who can’t pay the rent, ” Arturo says. “It freaks me out. I grew up in a household of freelance artists. I know that no one wants to take care of us. We want to feed the kids, pay the rent. We know that the money from the government is going to corporations with no tracking of how they’re spending that money. It’s $42 trillion to the top, and 1 percent to the rest. Freelancers don’t exist because the emphasis is helping out banks in our socio-political situation. That’s why we are angry and are speaking out.” |
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