O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble in Full Conversation at SFJAZZ
Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble. Photo: Steve Roby
At SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, the pianist-bandleader fused Cuban memory, Afro-Peruvian pulse, and border-born fandango into music that championed community as rhythm—and rhythm as community.
What you notice first is the circle. Not a literal one—the chairs sit in standard rows—but a social circle that materializes as soon as Arturo O’Farrill addresses the room. He jokes, testifies, and conducts—in short bursts of fingers and eyebrows—an octet that behaves like a civic body. Before the opening tune is even cold, he frames the night’s thesis: urgency yoked to fellowship. The first piece, “Not Now, Right Now,” by Afro-Puerto Rican trombonist and poet Pablo Vázquez, lands as a call to action that’s musical first and political by consequence; the percussion choir—cajón, congas, and trap set—tiles a floor for the horns to stride across.
O’Farrill presents Afro-Latin jazz as more than a stylistic enclave. It is a meeting ground. He says as much when he introduces “El Sur,” saluting Peruvian trumpeter-composer Gabriel Alegría. The arrangement carries a lilt that folds indigenous Peruvian elements and African roots into modern improvisation—an “ancient future,” as O’Farrill calls it. Jim Seeley’s trumpet—shaped by time with Ray Charles and the Afro-Latin big-band tradition—cuts clarion lines while the rhythm team shifts the ground beneath him, turning pulse into argument and back again.
That argument inevitably leads to Cuba. O’Farrill speaks of his father, Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill, as the composer who widened jazz’s map and placed the Americas at its center with suite-scaled Afro-Cuban logic. The son honors that geography by refusing to let it calcify. “Guajira Simple,” by Alexis Bosch, arrives not as a heritage artifact but as a living negotiation—between danzón grace and post-bop harmony, between guajira cadence and contemporary pressure. O’Farrill’s piano touch—more water than hammer, by his description—flows through the keys with unforced, legato logic, pushing ideas forward without manhandling the instrument.
Photo by Steve Roby
Mid-set comes the axial statement, “Clump Unclump,” O’Farrill’s celebration of cycles—the way realities gather and scatter, then gather again. The writing mirrors the theme: short phrases swarm and dissipate; the horns knot into machine-like unisons before shattering into staggered counterlines. Vince Cherico’s cymbal work and Keisel Jiménez Leyva’s small-drum accents make the music breathe in odd-numbered places; Carlos “Carly” Maldonado’s congas answer in properly West-Hemispheric polyrhythm. The piece functions as both a physics lesson and a social practice, a reminder that groove is what communities do when they agree on time.
O’Farrill’s stage stories are never throwaways; they frame the music. One concerns Fandango at the Wall, the long-running project that unites musicians across the San Ysidro–Tijuana border—sometimes literally through the fence. His tale of an “interspecies jam session” with a Tijuana dancing horse could be seen as shtick, but in his telling, it becomes a parable: turning instruments of division into vessels of joy. The band follows with “El Margasher,” a Yucatán folk song retuned for the octet, and the room tilts toward a fiesta without surrendering complexity.
Personnel matters—and not just for résumés. Tenor saxophonist/flutist Ivan Renta, a preeminent yet underrecognized voice with deep roots in Tito Puente’s world, lends the music a distinctive tone; you hear the street and the conservatory sharing a standard diaphragm. Trombonist Rafi Malkiel adds burnished, North-African-tinged inflections that widen the band’s color field. Seeley’s lead trumpet—focused, never strident—carries the shapely lyricism you associate with the great Afro-Caribbean big-band lineages but works just as persuasively in small-group dialogue. At the core, bassist Raúl Reyes Bueno keeps time the way good historians do: by telling you where you’ve been with each beat, then implying the next place you ought to go.
l-r: Vince Cherico, Keisel Jiménez Leyva, and Carlos "Carly" Maldonado. Photo: Steve Roby
The set’s penultimate surge nods to Oscar Hernández with a rumba O’Farrill introduces as “Rumba Urbana,” the hard-swinging closer that treats the clave not as a cage but as a set of open doors. Here, the percussion triumvirate writes the review in real time—Maldonado staking the tumbao, Jiménez Leyva answering with metallic flares, and Cherico dropping snare-drum consonants that turn the dance into grammar. Over the top, Renta’s tenor shouts, then whispers; Malkiel answers from the waist of the horn; O’Farrill’s right hand, water again, outlines fresh changes that make the familiar feel vanguard.
Encore & credo, clarified. After the ovation, O’Farrill returned with the whole ensemble and took a beat to talk about the life behind the music. “We’re not crypto trillionaires,” he said with a half-smile, “we’re working artists.” The laugh that followed wasn’t just at the joke; it acknowledged the grind—airport tedium, side-hustles between gigs, the stubborn faith it takes to keep a band together. Then he offered the creed that has animated his projects from Fandango to Belongó: “We do this because if you do it right, the music disappears… our spirits are commingling in a way that can never be repeated.” The ensemble sealed that sentiment with “Scapular,” an encore from a ballet score: a melody suspended over a percussion hush, then settling into a communal shimmer that felt more like a benediction than a bow.
Arturo O’Farrill. Photo by Steve Roby
“We do this because if you do it right, the music disappears… our spirits are commingling in a way that can never be repeated.”
Seasoned jazz listeners know the temptation, when confronted with Afro-Latin music of this caliber, to count styles: a rumba here, a guajira there, festejo shading a son-derived bass line. But O’Farrill is not a sampler-in-chief. He is a builder of rooms. His nonprofit work under the Belongó banner—an effort to open Casa Belongó in East Harlem as a public commons for art—clarifies the aesthetic: “The arts belong to the people,” he repeats, and the music bears it out. Pieces arrive as invitations to belong, not permissions to spectate; the audience is treated as a second percussion section, responsible for energy and attention. In that sense, the night’s most radical act is procedural, as it allows the band and the crowd to co-author the experience; O’Farrill positions Afro-Latin jazz not as repertoire but as a polity.
That polity has a history, and Miner heard it honored without a hint of nostalgia. The thought of Chico hovered—less a shadow than a pressure system—whenever lines interlocked bebop syntax with Cuban counter-rhythm. Yet the son’s voice is his own: a water-touch at the piano; a taste for humor that nods to Carla Bley’s mischievous rigor; an insistence that pieces like “Clump Unclump” can stage philosophical debates without sacrificing dance. The horn voicings stay fresh, never defaulting to thick unisons for volume; instead, O’Farrill prefers translucence, so you can hear how each line negotiates with the others. When the band does converge—especially on cadential shouts—the effect is less big-band bombast than collective declaration.
What did it all mean? Not that the Americas are a melting pot—melting is too passive—but that the Americas are a canon in the making, revised nightly by whoever shows up ready to listen and answer. As the encore dissolved, you could hear O’Farrill’s larger wager: music can model the society it hopes to midwife—one where time is shared, differences are voiced, and the groove keeps us honest. His place in the lineage is secure because he treats lineage as a living responsibility. The forward motion continues—fresh commissions, new collaborations, and, if the vision holds, more rooms to build where the arts belong to everyone.
Setlist: “Not Now, Right Now”; “El Sur”; “Guajira Simple”; “Clump Unclump”; “El Margasher”; “Rumba Urbana”.”
Encore: “Scapular.”
