Sandoval Blows Horn for Freedom; Listening to jazz music once offered Arturo Sandoval a kind of escape from Cuba's oppression. But the trumpet master found true liberation after defecting to America

Insight on the News, March 29, 2004

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

One of the biggest cultural blows to Fidel Castro occurred in 1990, when jazz trumpet master Arturo Sandoval, who had toured the world wowing audiences with his horn and touting La Revolucin, defected and proceeded to proclaim that everything he had said about Castro was a lie.

The story of his daring defection, which took place at the U.S. Embassy in Athens with the aid of trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie, was the subject of the Emmy-winning HBO documentary For Love or Country. Sandoval's wife and son defected at the same time in London, and Gillespie and Vice President Dan Quayle later helped them to settle in Florida.

Making his home in Coral Gables, just outside of Miami, Sandoval is active with the Cuban exile community. At the same time, he has contributed culturally to his new country with innovative compositions performed with symphony orchestras and by passing on his love for jazz to a new generation of musicians.

Insight caught up with Sandoval most recently when he was in Washington to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. He talked about the various opportunities the United States has given him, including the chance to work seriously with piano for the first time in his life. Sandoval, who recently released an acclaimed album of his piano work, said he seldom had access to this instrument in Cuba. "I've always loved the piano," he said, "but in Cuba I never had one."

Sandoval continued: "It is the government that provides instruments to musicians, and I was a trumpet player. They didn't think I deserved a piano, and I didn't have the means or opportunity to buy one. I bought my first piano when I came here 13 years ago, and I started practicing and practicing and practicing like crazy."

This picture profile includes material from interviews with Sandoval conducted by John Berlau since 2001.

Insight: Mr. Sandoval, you're famous for your innovations in Latin jazz. But it has been reported that some of the Latin part, the bongos for instance, actually resulted from an effort to disguise the music to get by a Castro government edict against jazz. Is that true?

Arturo Sandoval: Yes. They called jazz the music of the imperialists. What we [members of his Cuban band Irakere] really wanted was to improvise and play jazz. As a group of people, we loved jazz, but then we weren't allowed to play jazz, and so we had to invent a way to go around and do it anyway. We called it new Cuban music.

Q: So was the music authentic? Were you able to produce good natural music out of that?

A: Yes. The result of that experiment came out good, and people really liked it. We blew some bebop and some jazz. It was a vehicle for us to play jazz, but we were covered somehow, because we were playing a kind of experimental new kind of Cuban music. Many people, of course, knew it was jazz.

Q: When did you first hear jazz music?

A: In 1966 or 1967, when somebody played me a Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker record. It was one of the records from 1946 or 1947. We didn't have any new jazz records because there were no record stores at all.

Man, when I heard that, I couldn't believe it. I said, "Wow! Goodness, what kind of music is that?" I was in love with it.

I had been playing classical trumpet since I was 11. There was a small brass band in my home village, and I joined a bunch of kids there. I tried different instruments until I decided the trumpet was the one I liked.

When I heard Dizzy I started to practice more and more and more. That was also my only way to get out of the complete frustration we had on the island. There were so many difficulties and a scarcity of everything. But of course, when you want to do something in music, nothing's going to stop you. Not even Castro.

Q: But the Cuban government did put you in jail once for four months just for listening to American jazz?

A: They caught me listening to the Voice of America on a short-wave radio. It was Willis Conover's Jazz Hour. I was 21 years old, in the obligatory military service, so it was a military prison. They let my parents come every two weeks for a few minutes to visit. I was very, very frustrated. I couldn't touch the horn or do anything.

Q: But eventually, a couple of decades later, you got to the point where you were allowed to tour around the world playing the kind of music you wanted to play. What was it that made you want to leave Cuba so badly and come here?

A: Freedom. When you have freedom, you have everything. When you don't have freedom, you have nothing. That's the bottom line. That's the most important thing.

You know, unfortunately, not everyone knows exactly what freedom means. To know exactly what it is, you have to lose it first. Only that will give you the exact idea of what it means to be under the repression and oppression we have in Cuba, where the government tells you to do whatever they want and the way they want it done, and you can't decide anything on your own.