Arturo Sandoval is a Cuban American jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer. Sandoval, while still in Cuba, was influenced by jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie, finally meeting Gillespie later in 1977. Gillespie became a mentor and colleague, playing with Sandoval in concerts in Europe and Cuba and later featuring him in the United Nations Orchestra.
Background
Arturo Sandoval was born in Artemisa, a small town on the outskirts of Havana, on November 6,1949. Unlike many great musicians who come from musical families, nothing in his upbringing suggested that he would become a world-renowned musician. His father was a mechanic and his mother worked at home. He remembers wearing his first pair of shoes when he was 12 years old. Growing up in Artemisa, Sandoval was exposed almost exclusively to traditional and rhythmic Afro-Cuban music and played congas and cymbals in his high school band. He reminisced how "one day, I started to look at the trumpet with the comer of the eyes, I said, 'I think it is trumpet I want to play'" .
Education
At 12 he began to play an old battered pocket cornet, a miniature version of the trumpet, and on the streets of his hometown participated in jam sessions of son and other traditional forms of Cuban music with much older and experienced musicians. Although his family's expected that he would study to become a doctor or lawyer, he was focused on the trumpet, and for a while learned what he could from borrowed methods books he painstakingly copied by hand as well as from the other musicians in Artemisa. He continued gaining experience in Cuban music as a member of a band until right before his 15th birthday, when he earned a scholarship to begin three years of serious classical trumpet studies at the School of Music and Arts in Havana. By the time he was 16, he was a member of Cuba's all-star national band. In 1971 he interrupted his trumpet studies to serve his three years of compulsory service in the Cuban armed forces. He played with the Cuban Orchestra of Modern Music and quickly became lead trumpet player. While in the military, he covertly listened to jazz on the Voice of the America radio station and received a punishment of four months in prison when he was caught listening to this music.
Career
At 23, he became one of the founders of the legendary and exuberant lrakere band, known for its fusion of jazz, rock, and classical music with traditional Cuban rhythms. It was also then that he began to garner critical global recognition and reputation as an accomplished trumpet player. During Sandoval's tenure with lrakere, the group won many international awards, including a Grammy, and Sandoval's musical reputation was solidified.
The first jazz that Sandoval ever encountered was a bootleg copy of a Dizzy Gillespie record that he heard while learning to play trumpet. In 1977, when Dizzy Gillespie was visiting Cuba, young Sandoval was more than eager to acquiesce to Gillespie's desire to visit black Cuban neighborhoods where musicians customarily played Afro-Cuban rhythms on the streets. In his dilapidated Opel, Sandoval shepherded his idol through Havana to hear "real" Cuban music. That evening, Gillespie was amazed to see and hear his driver playing incredible jazz on his trumpet. Sandoval laughs when he remembers this experience, "Somehow, it never got across to him that I played trumpet, too. He thought I was a driver assigned to him. His jaw dropped!" (Gudbaur 1997). He quickly became a worldwide sensation after performing at the 1978 Newport Jazz Festival in New York City and was offered a recording contract with Columbia Records.
In 1981 he organized his own band and from 1982 to 1984 was voted Cuba's best instrumentalist. He continued his musical career playing Latin music and jazz, and on occasions traveled abroad as a guest artist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London and the Leningrad Symphony in Russia.
A jazz lover, Sandoval's artistic freedom became increasingly curtailed by the government, which disregarded jazz and monitored performances and recordings.
By the late 1980s, Sandoval had signed on as a member of Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra, and was traveling to all parts of the world, except the United States, which was prohibited to him by the Cuban government. Although he was familiar with jazz by the time he met Gillespie, he credits "Diz," "his spiritual father," with teaching him the American jazz tradition and sharing stories of his experiences in the United States as a black musician in the Jim Crow days of the South.
In 1990 Sandoval was on a six-month tour of Europe with Gillespie's band and had persuaded the Cuban government to allow his wife and son to visit him there. Aware that his wife and son were given political asylum in the American embassy in London, Sandoval was escorted by Gillespie and armed Italian police to the American Embassy in Rome, where he defected. In Cuba, his music disappeared from shelves, and could not be played on the radio. Three years later, in 1993, his parents escaped the island on an overcrowded fishing boat and joined him in Miami.
After his defection he made his American debut album, Flight to Freedom. Since 1990, he has recorded an average of one CD per year. His Danzón CD won him a Grammy in 1994. Over the years, Arturo Sandoval has had 12 Grammy nominations and has been awarded four Grammys. He has also written and performed on several feature film soundtracks including Havana (1990), The Mambo Kings (1992), and The Pérez Family (1995). In 2001 he was the subject of the HBO film For Love of Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, produced by actor Andy Garcia, winner of an American Latino Media Award (ALMA), and nominated for four Emmys. He also won an Emmy for Outstanding Musical Composition for the film's score. On May 10, 2001, Sandoval was honored with an award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for his contributions to Latin music. His piano-playing debut, My Passion for the Piano, was released in 2002.
As a professor, he conducts music clinics for students and has lectured at the Conservatoire de Paris, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia, the University of California and at many institutions all over the world. Presently, he holds the rank of full professor at Florida international University, and offers over 50 performances and lectures per year in institutions of higher education across the United States.