[Dixielandjazz] Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter/pianist , plans Miami Jazz Club.

[Norman Vickers]

Bob Ringwald, our esteemed list-leader wrote:
>>Norm, please post this on DJML.

So, here it is!

Norman--Ringwald's wish is my command--Vickers
Pensacola


.

Re:  Story from St. Petersburg Times about Cuban-born trumpeter/pianist
Arturo Sandoval.



Saxophonist C. J. Landry, formerly member of U. S. Navy Commodores, now  of
Lillian, AL passed this along to me.
At the beginning of this post, there's a quote from the late Willis Conover
who was a regular broadcaster for Voice of America.  When the Am. Federation
of Jazz Societies met in D. C. Conover was one of our speakers.






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"Jazz is a classic parallel to our American political and social system.
We agree in advance on the laws and the customs we abide by.
And having reached agreement,
we are free to do whatever we wish within these constraints.
It is the same with jazz.
The musicians agree on the key, the harmonic changes,
 the tempo and the duration of the piece.
Within those guidelines, they are free to play what they want.
And when people in other countries hear that quality in the music,
it stimulates in them a need for the same freedom in the conduct of their
lives."
--  Willis Conover, Voice of America

Check out our website...   VOA News.com
http://www.voanews.com/index.cfm

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http://www.sptimes.com/2006/03/30/Floridian/A_drive_to_improvise.shtml

Music

A Drive to Improvise

Arturo Sandoval, who made his fame and fortune as a jazz trumpeter, channels
his creative
nature into a new venture: a jazz club in Miami Beach.


By DAVID ADAMS, ( St. Petersburg, FL)Times Latin America Correspondent

Published March 30, 2006

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---- 

MIAMI

He's a jazz trumpeter ranked right up there with Miles Davis and Louis
Armstrong. At 56, he boasts a personal history so
dramatic, HBO made a movie out of it. The four-time Grammy winner has
performed all over the world, from the most intimate

clubs to the Super Bowl halftime show.  But does Arturo Sandoval have what
it takes to open a successful jazz club in his
adopted home town?

Miami Beach - known for many things, but never for its jazz scene - is about
to find out.

The Arturo Sandoval Jazz Club opens Sunday, promising to put Miami on the
international jazz circuit.

"Believe it or not, it's my wife's dream," Sandoval said over a cup of Cuban
espresso one morning last week at his Coral
Gables home.

Success, he says, is "up to God," puffing his first cigar of the day, a
Fuente Don Carlos.

His wife of 31 years, Marianela, is making sure God is getting all the help
he needs. She has been putting in 14-hour days to
get the club ready for its launch.

Arturo Sandoval acknowledges it would have been far easier to open a club in
a city with a proven appetite for jazz. "I hope
they recognize that instead of doing it somewhere else we did it in Miami."

In part, he's motivated by his desire to give something back to his adopted
city, 15 years after he fled Cuba.

Miami's lack of jazz aficionados "has always been a little knife" in his
side. "People aren't used to that kind of music."

Jazz audiences "are not like the regular guy in the street who likes to
listen to a hot tune playing on the radio. The people who
enjoy and listen to jazz are very loyal to the style. They go to places and
respect and admire the artists. That's the audience we
are looking for."

Will Sandoval find his crowd in Miami?

"There's definitely potential," said Cary Barnhard, editor of Heat Beat, a
South Florida music magazine. "He's got a reputation.
He's definitely going to have something of a fan base."

Finding a voice

Sandoval's virtuosity on the trumpet, his ability to squeeze out impossibly
high notes, made him famous, but he also is loved for
other reasons in South Florida. He is very much at home among Miami's Cuban
exile crowd and doesn't hesitate to express his
hatred for Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

He grew up in poverty in a small town in central Cuba. His father was a car
mechanic. "We were so poor our house had a dirt
floor," he said.

He quit school at the start of fifth grade. There were no musical roots in
his family, but he started playing drums on tabletops
when he was 6. A neighbor bought him some conga drums. His aunt bought him a
cornet at 10, but his first lesson ended in
tears after his teacher threw him out.

He walked the 2 to 3 miles home crying. But he wouldn't give up, practicing
until his lips bled. By the time he was in his early
teens, he got a scholarship to receive classical training at the National
School of the Arts in Havana. Sandoval, who was just 9
when Castro took over the government, rejects any suggestion that Cuba's
vaunted education system in any way
contributed to his musical talent.

"I wanted to make music, no matter what," he said. "Art in general doesn't
have anything to do with the political system. It's up
to the individual. It's your goal, it's your desire, it's your passion."

He joined a big band in 1967, but that was interrupted by three years of
military service. Soon he made his name with the
group Irakere, playing alongside saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera and pianist
Chucho Valdes.

After the revolution, jazz was banned along with other
"counterrevolutionary" music, including the Beatles. Sandoval recalls
Cuban state TV using Duke Ellington as background music to accompany
historical footage of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

There were no records or record stores in Cuba, so Sandoval kept up with the
foreign jazz scene
by listening to shortwave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America. He
became a devotee of the
daily jazz hour hosted by Willis Conover.

"That was the only way we had to know what was going on," he said.

On one occasion he was caught and jailed for four months for listening to
the voice of the enemy.

The Ministry of Culture wasn't happy with his group playing the fast rhythm
changes of bebop, imitating the style of Charlie
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The cymbals were removed from their drum kit.
They traded them for cowbells and other
Afro-Cuban instruments, disguising their sound as experimental Cuban music.

The cultural line softened in the 1970s, so much so that Gillespie came to
Cuba in 1977 while working a Caribbean jazz cruise
with Stan Getz. Sandoval went to the harbor and offered to drive Gillespie
around Havana in a beat-up 1951 Plymouth.

They spent the day together, but Sandoval never mentioned he was a musician.
That night, at a government-organized event
with local musicians including Irakere, Gillespie was surprised to see his
chauffeur warming up on the trumpet. He got an even
bigger surprise when Sandoval started to play.

It was the beginning of a great friendship that lasted until Gillespie's
death in 1993. "He was the guy who put me on the map,"
said Sandoval.

Gillespie started talking up Sandoval to his friends in New York, and soon
Irakere was signed by CBS records. When
Sandoval took the stage for the 1978 Newport Jazz festival, Gillespie and
Getz were in the front row. Sandoval wanted to
defect immediately but had to wait until 1990 so he could bring his wife and
son with him. The moment came in Rome, where
he was touring with Gillespie. The two men went together to the U.S.
embassy, where Sandoval asked for asylum.

North of South Beach

Today the Sandovals' spacious living room is dominated by a Boesendorfer
piano that's a half a foot longer than the largest
Steinway and three times the price ($182,000). Customized with an extra 10
keys on the bottom, it was once owned by jazz
great Oscar Peterson.

Each morning, before he even brushes his teeth, Sandoval plays for an hour.
He calls it his "first contact with the music."

While chatting with a visitor, he sat at the piano, cigar between his teeth,
and happily improvised for 15 minutes. His big black
Belgian shepherd Lobo lounged a few feet away on the patio.

Sandoval made his name with the trumpet, but he calls the Boesendorfer "my
favorite toy."

"Imagine you have all the money in the world and you go to Lamborghini and
ask for a custom model with 24-carat gold
interior and bulletproof exterior. That's what this is."

Sandoval plans to be heavily involved in the club, while continuing to keep
up his busy international performance schedule. He
has hired a full-time booking agent to bring in a stream of headliners,
including Dee Dee Bridgewater, James Moody, Roy
Haynes, as well as Miami saxophonist Ed Calle. Roberta Flack is the featured
artist Saturday for a private party celebrating the
new club.

The club is housed at the Deauville Beach Resort on Collins Avenue, a
landmark hotel with plenty of musical history - Frank
Sinatra, Diana Ross and Tony Bennett all have played there.  The Beatles
recorded their second appearance on The Ed
Sullivan Show in the hotel's Napoleon Ballroom in February 1964.

But today the hotel is situated in what beach residents like to call condo
canyon, well north of South Beach's popular
nightspots.

"The odds are somewhat stacked against him," says Don Wilner, jazz bassist
and longtime musical director at Upstairs at the
Van Dyke, a popular restaurant on Lincoln Road, Miami Beach's bustling
pedestrian-only street in the heart of the art deco
tourist district.

Wilner's jazz nights have survived 12 years at the Van Dyke, a tribute to
the mix of good music with well-priced food and one
of South Florida's best walk-in locations. Other Miami area jazz clubs have
flopped or resorted to featuring a mix of musical
styles including R&B and rock.

"The DJs are taking over very much on South Beach," said Jorge Guzman, a
jazz musician with the band Amareida, who is
booked to play at Sandoval's club in May.

"I'm really looking forward to it. It's very laudable what he is doing," he
said.

Sandoval isn't letting himself worry too much. Instead, he jokes about
dipping into his safe to finance the club.

Then he turns to his Boesendorfer and resumes improvising.

David Adams can be reached at dadams at sptimes.com.

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>From Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain:

Before rock there was, of course, dzhaz, another Western import that
Khrushchev called "that noise music," and which Soviet
conservatives also tried to outlaw but eventually came to co-opt.

"Why did we love it so?" asks Vasily Aksyonov of jazz. "Perhaps," he said,
"for the same reason the Communists (and the
Nazis before them) hated it.  For its refusal to be pinned down, its
improvisatory nature.  Living as we did in a totalitarian
society, we needed relief from the structures of our minutely controlled
everyday lives, of the five-year plans, of historical
materialism.  Traveling to Europe, especially Eastern Europe, jazz became
more than music; it took on an ideology or, rather an

anti-ideology.  Jazz was a platonic rendezvous with freedom."

Aksyonov also believes that jazz was "America's secret weapon number one":

"Every night the Voice of America would beam a two-hour jazz program at the
Soviet Union from Tangiers.  The
snatches of music and bits of information made for a kind of golden glow
over the horizon when the sun went down, that is, in
the West, the inaccessible but oh so desirable West.  How many dreamy
Russian boys came to puberty to the strains of Duke
Ellington's 'Take the A Train' and the dulcet voice of Willis Conover, The
VOA's Mr. Jazz.  We taped the music on our
antediluvian recorders, and played it over and over at semi-underground
parties, which often ended in fist fights with
Komsomol patrols or even police raids."

One reason they listened, Conover believed, is that there is a sense of
freedom they could detect in jazz.  As he explained,
"Jazz is a cross between total discipline and anarchy.  The musicians agree
on tempo, key and chord structure but beyond this
everyone is free to express himself.  This is jazz.  And this is America.
That's what gives this music validity.  It's a musical
reflection of the way things happen in America.  We're not apt to recognize
this over here but people in other countries can feel
this element of freedom."

Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain by Yale Richmond
(pages 204 and 205).  Published in 2003
by Penn State Press, University Park, PA.

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HAPPY JAZZ MONTH!!! Please take some time to celebrate jazz.  Buy a CD.  Go
to a concert.  Listen to a jazz station on the radio or on the Internet.
Dance with your honey (or maybe even someone else's honey :-)).  But please
take some time to enjoy the music.  And enjoy the freedom too.
				--End--