The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s recap of pianist, composer, and conductor Arturo O’Farrill’s performance entitled Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, which took place on 14 December at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
O’Farrill was joined by his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, and special guests in tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, and harmonicist Karen Mantler. The performance shared a name with Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, O’Farrill’s album due out 7 February 2025 via ZOHO Music. A link to the album can be found at the end of this article.
“Sorry about that noise,” Arturo O’Farrill interjects about some stray digital interference – a car door or something – at the top of our call. This takes on accidental resonance, as we speak the morning after his Mundoagua performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
O’Farrill explains that when he’s onstage, he tries to zero out the noise in all its forms, which can even extend to a sort of self-atomisation. “It’s funny: you have to divest yourself, in my opinion, from being you,” he says, despite his magnetic, gregarious nature. (I first interviewed the Mexican-born, six-time GRAMMY winner for this 2022 piece: dig in if you’re a fellow traveller to the Arturoverse.)
“When I’m up there, playing gorgeous music for beautiful people in a sacred space,” continues O’Farrill, “I try not to feel anything. I try to be as present and mindful of anything but myself.”
He has a history with St. Ann’s Warehouse. Last year, not in the 19th century tobacco warehouse, but as part of its programming, O’Farrill performed with classical pianist Lara Downes, underneath the adjacent Brooklyn Bridge. A few years before, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, he and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra performed music from Fandango at the Wall, a conceptually cross-border project in support of immigration rights.
This makes St Ann’s Warehouse a natural place for O’Farrill to debut a highly personal project. After all, Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley refers to his crucial mentor, who selected him to perform as part of her big band in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
“She had such a beautiful sense of herself and what was interesting to her, and she was not afraid to use humor, irony, and satire,” O’Farrill says of the composer, arranger, and pianist, preeminent in jazz and creative music, mostly on ECM’s sibling label WATT.
“Everything that I know about music, everything I know about telling a story, being a journalist, communicating a truth,” O’Farrill continues, “I learned from her, because that’s who she was.”
The St. Ann’s concert kicked off with the timely ‘Holiday Mambo,’ by O’Farrill’s father, the pioneering Cuban jazz trumpeter and composer Chico O’Farrill. The bandleader’s ‘Clump Unclump’ – which appeared on his 2020 album Four Questions – furthered the momentum.
Then came ‘Mundoagua’, commissioned by the Columbia School of Music in commemoration of the Year of Water, themed after “the horrors of global warming,” which the composer considers “my greatest composition.” Which, given his record of prodigiousness as a composer – whether beneath the sometimes reductive “Latin jazz” umbrella or not – is an ear-catching statement.
“I’ve always thought that the destination of music is not the music itself, but what it does to humanity,” O’Farrill muses. “It’s like Salman Rushdie said [paraphrasing]: ‘We can’t stop bullets, but we can name the liars.’”
The centrepiece of the evening was ‘Blue Palestine’, dealing in Middle Eastern and South Asian modalities, commissioned specifically for O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, distinguished as Bley’s final work. (Guests Lovano and Brennan were predictably fantastic: I look forward to checking out the sonorous, incisive vibraphonist’s latest album, Breaking Stretch, released last autumn.)
“Even at the age of 80-plus, an NEA Jazz Master, somebody who had already created a legacy of historical proportion,” O’Farrill says, “she still was curious. She was still interested.” In that regard, he carried the flame at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Bley – the maestro – never went anywhere.
