Arturo O’Farrill, Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer, comes to the Arsht with his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and opening act Diego Figueiredo!
O’Farrill’s debut album with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, Una Noche Inolvidable, earned a first GRAMMY® Award nomination in 2005. His next album, Song for Chico, earned a GRAMMY® Award for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2009. The 2014 release of The Offense of the Drum was yet another GRAMMY® Award winner. O’Farrill was, in addition, the winner of the Latin Jazz USA Outstanding Achievement Award, and a Cubadisco Award Winner for The Offense of the Drum in 2015. Arturo’s well-reviewed and highly praised “Afro-Latin Jazz Suite” from the album CUBA: The Conversation Continues (Motéma) took the 2015 GRAMMY® Award for Best Instrumental Composition and the 2016 Latin GRAMMY® Award for Best Latin Jazz Album. His powerful "Three Revolutions" from the album Familia: Tribute to Bebo & Chico won the 2018 GRAMMY® Award winner for Best Instrumental Composition.
Throughout his solo career, O’Farrill has collaborated with a spectrum of artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Turre, Freddy Cole, The Fort Apache Band, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Belafonte. In 1995, O’Farrill agreed to direct the band that preserved much of his father’s music, the Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra. In 2010, O’Farrill traveled with the original Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra to Cuba, returning his father’s musicians to his homeland for headlining performances at the 26th edition of the Havana International Jazz Festival. O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra continues the tradition every Sunday night at Birdland, which has for decades been one of the most popular jazz clubs in the United States.
O’Farrill has performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Boston Symphony Hall, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Joyce Theater (with Ballet Hispanico, Malpaso Dance Company and Ron Brown/EVIDENCE), Megaron Concert Hall (Athens, Greece), Kannai Hall (Yokohama, Japan), the Taichung Jazz Festival (Taichung, Taiwan) and at New York’s Symphony Space, where he and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra have been in residence since 2007.
A recognized composer, O’Farrill has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Philadelphia Music Project, Symphony Space, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation and the famous Apollo Theater. He has also composed music for films, including Hollywoodland and Salud.
The evening will begin with Diego Figueiredo, whom George Benson has described as “one of the greatest guitarists I've seen my whole life!” Figueiredo is also a producer, arranger, orchestrator and multi-instrumentalist, which makes his music an original fusion of jazz, bossa nova and classical. He has performed in more than 40 countries, and his phenomenal technique and passion has created an explosion of adoring fans around the world.
