Jazz in the time of communism
Röhan Abraham
Arturo Sandoval does not blow his own trumpet. “Whatever I know, I learned on the street. Music is a gift from god,” says the ten-time Grammy Award winner, during a recent visit to India. Sandoval, 70, is by no means a new star in the jazz firmament, but the Cuban-American reckons that each time he steps onto the rostrum — trumpet in hand — the musical white whale has to be pursued anew.
“I have been touring for many years now. I started playing music in 1960… 60 years of playing music, my friend. I started touring in the beginning of the 70s. My first tour was in 1971. I’m still doing it, and every time is a different experience,” Sandoval says, his words drowning in the mellow tunes of the hotel lobby. For a trumpeter with a weakness for cigars, Sandoval has a surprisingly soft voice.
It is late afternoon in South Bombay, and the hotel’s restaurant has been largely divested of its patrons. Sandoval is wearing an open-neck t-shirt. A rosary with red and black beads hangs around his neck like a worm-on-a-string necklace. A shock of grey hair is combed back in a cowlick, and red horn-rimmed glasses sit on his bulbous nose. “This is a great welcome. It was my birthday in November,” he says, his rusty bug eyes scanning the Christmas decorations festooned on the walls.
“A dear, dear friend of mine gave me a pig as a birthday present. It is actually a mini pig.
“We call her Lucy, from ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ (a reference to the eponymous Beatles’ song). I also have two dogs, Coco and Chanel. I love them. I love dogs. I love all animals. Now, we have Coco, Chanel, and Lucy,” he says.
In January 1969, at the height of the counterculture movement, the Beatles made their final public performance on home turf. The quartet clambered onto the rooftop of a building in Savile Row — London’s commercial and fashion district — for an impromptu concert, their mop-topped noggins exposed to the wintry chill. One of the last songs they performed before the Metropolitan Police cut short their swansong was ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
As the music died down, in another corner of the world, Sandoval was apprehended in the grimy barracks of a Cuban military camp where he was stationed.
Induction notices were sent to all young men after the revolution brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959. “I served for three years. It was a bad time,” says Sandoval, who was tasked with cleaning the barracks and building latrines.
Military service was mandatory, but life threw him a curveball when he was caught by a sergeant for listening to an American radio station in his room.
A young Arturo Sandoval was sentenced to three-and-a-half months in prison for the crime of listening to a music programme on the ‘Voice of America.’
“You know, the people in uniforms, the dictators, they call jazz the music of the imperialists — the junkie imperialists. That’s such a horrible thing. I was in obligatory military service for three years. I was 20 years old, yeah. It was horrible. I was three years there and I was listening to the radio — a jazz programme that they broadcast every day from Washington DC.
“They call it Jazz Hour on the Voice America, which is a radio station. I was listening to that and a sergeant catch me listen to that and he brought me to the officer or the captain or whatever, who put me in jail for three-and-a-half months… all because I was listening to the voice of the enemy. I was by myself in a corner (of the cell). And I don’t even understand English. I don’t know what they say (on the show). I just listen to the music. But they don’t care. They don’t care,” he says.
By then, Sandoval was already acquainted with the rudiments of music, having taught himself how to play the trumpet by listening to folk songs. His family ran a garage on the outskirts of Havana, but Arturo’s boyish excursions to the greasy realm of his father soon came to an end. After the revolution, private property was confiscated, and Sandoval Sr., a mechanic, was forced to work for the government for a paltry salary.
“I had to leave school when I was in fifth grade. There was no food. It was that bad,” says Sandoval, who did odd jobs to supplement his father’s income, which was barely enough to make ends meet. A generation was upended, and disaffection with the regime was rife. Influential families like the Bacardis went into exile.
Well-heeled Cubans who could afford to bribe communist officials and pay for a passage out of the country traded their wealth for liberty. The Sandovals, like most other poor families, were left behind. In an age of uncertainty and famine, music was Arturo’s salvation.
“I was introduced to music through the trumpet. The piano came much, much later. For that you need a classical training. The piano, I played by ear. I use it to arrange, to write music, to learn, improvisation… all those things. But the trumpet is my main instrument.
“I was nine years old when I began playing the trumpet. And I started playing it professionally when I was 11 years old. I never got lessons or anything,” says Sandoval, who converted this apparent handicap into an asset when he made the transition to jazz.
Street musicians proffered Cuban folk songs — a bastard genre birthed by cultural miscegenation between the Spanish settlers and slaves brought over from Africa to work on sugar plantations during the colonial era.
Despite his unconventional education, Sandoval was admitted to the gilded corridors of Havana’s music academy, a holdover from an earlier time when the arts were the preserve of city elites.
“I grew up in a small village in the countryside of the village. It was traditional Cuban music that I was initially able to listen and play. Later on, I was awarded a scholarship for three years at the Cuban National School of Arts in Havana where I got classical training,” Sandoval says. He became one of the youngest musicians to be invited to the Cuban National All-Star band. “When I get out of the school, I start to play with different bands,” he says.
After a forgettable stint in the army, Sandoval’s musical career segued smoothly from folk to classical, and then jazz. Irakere, a band he founded in his twenties catapulted him to fame.
In the early days of communist consolidation, the Castro brothers — Fidel and Raul — adopted a three-pronged approach to legitimize the regime on the world stage and quell disenchantment at home.
Crates of the rum and cigars were shipped to far-flung corners of the world, bolstering the treasury and enabling the government to spend on populist schemes. By aligning with the Soviet Bloc, Cuba was asserting itself diplomatically at multilateral forums, sending peacekeeping forces and doctors to warzones shaped by the postcolonial narrative in African countries. At the Olympic Games, Cuban pugilists were a fixture on the top step of the podium.
But the most famous cultural import of the time was perhaps Irakere, the band whose musical genome was unmistakably Cuban.
By blending the slow-burn bucolic tunes of the countryside and the foot-tapping numbers that were the rage in Havana salons, the band crafted a heady cocktail that rivaled the rum punch in popularity.
Cuba did not shut its doors to the world, even after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a failed proxy attempt by Washington to unseat the communist government in Cuba. If anything, it garnered support among neutrals, and continued to send cultural delegations to foreign countries including the United States.
“Even during that time, we used to travel a lot. There were no restrictions because we work for the government. Everybody in Cuba works for the government. They use us. They send us. They make a contract. They keep the money. We get nothing. Do you know what they call that? Communism. I call it dictatorship. But we had no choice,” Sandoval says.
Irakere’s music was a big hit with the purists and the hippies alike. They were invited to perform in prestigious venues like Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island.
The band was equally popular among the longhairs on American campuses — foot soldiers of the counterculture movement given to shooting speed in loaf-shaped Volkswagen microbuses and raising slogans against military campaigns in the Far East.
Freed from bureaucratic oversight on their trips abroad, Irakere began experimenting with genres that were outlawed at home. It was around this time that Sandoval, who was at the vanguard of the band’s musical evolution, stumbled upon jazz. “I knew a journalist in Cuba; the guy was a writer of some sort. But more importantly, he was a jazz lover. He asked me: are you familiar with jazz music? I said, no, and he’s like: why is that?
“And then he played an album for me. It was a record by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. That was the first jazz album I ever heard. I got crazy about it. It was in the mid-’60s, ’67 maybe. I was playing for seven years already but I had never heard any jazz. I just went crazy, man. I just wanted to learn it all,” Sandoval recounts.
Arturo, however, was cautious not to get carried away by this discovery, lest he repeat the youthful transgression that landed him in prison. At the time, dive bars in Havana were laboratories where musicians played songs informed by the myriad strains of pop, folk, and classical music. Jazz was shunned.
But the underground music scene in Cuba was thriving. After a decade of practicing in Havana living rooms, Sandoval was conversant in the syntax and modalities of jazz. He even ventured to play covers of his favourite songs when touring abroad. A decade after he first heard his first jazz record in 1967, Sandoval turned up at the harbour in Havana to receive Dizzy Gillespie.
“It was May 1977. I was already playing for 17 years when I first met Dizzy. He stopped in Havana for two days. He was playing on a boat, a cruise liner. I stopped there by the pier. I picked him up in my car and showed him the city for the very first time. He looked at me and asked his friend: What is my driver doing with a trumpet in his hand?” Sandoval says.
Cars were then a much-cherished possession in Cuba. After the communist revolution, the United States — which supplied nearly all the vehicles that plied on Cuban roads — issued an embargo on the export of goods to the island nation. Mechanical parts, including automobile spares, became scarce. It was not uncommon to find Soviet engines under the hood of USA-made cars.
Logistical hurdles, however, meant that imports from their Eurasian ally were expensive and hard to obtain. Cuba became a living museum for classic cars. Although he was acquainted with the inner workings of the automobile from the time spent in his family’s garage, Sandoval was not as adept a handyman as his father, as Gillespie found out to his chagrin.
“When I went to pick Dizzy up from his ship, I was driving a Plymouth 1951. It was an old car. It was falling apart, and I had just painted it with a brush myself using gasoline and tar. And the car smells horrible, okay. And Dizzy tells me: this car smells funny. I just painted it with tar and gasoline, I tell him.
“And he looks at me and says: you’re supposed to put the car on the road, not the road on the car,” Sandoval says, erupting into peals of laughter that send ripples down his shirtfront and cause his dome-like midriff to wobble like half-set jelly. Gillespie, who had a nose for talent, was impressed by Sandoval’s playing, and the two struck an enduring friendship.
“He was my hero, even before we met. Later on, yeah, he became more than a mentor. He became like a godfather to me. He helped me a lot. He gave me a lot of opportunities to play in so many places and to travel with him. For me, it was a gift from god to get the chance to be a good friend of my hero. It was a blessing for me. The whole thing started with that drive,” Sandoval says.
Master and apprentice reunited in 1978 when Sandoval traveled to New York with his band. “I set up a meeting, and then we play. After that, we meet every year and play music together. It was beautiful. We did it till Dizzy passed away in 1993,” he adds. Gillespie took Sandoval under his wing, making introductions to jazz patrons in New York high society. But his most generous act was perhaps granting the Cuban a chance to fly the coop and realize his true artistic potential.
Arturo Sandoval, however, had cold feet. In his early twenties, he fell in love with Marianela Gutierrez, a divorced bureaucrat with a young son. She was fiercely loyal to the communist cause, and Sandoval did not seem to have the remotest chance of influencing her worldview or winning her affections.
At one point during their courtship, he invited her to meet him in an empty baseball stadium. Standing at second base — and hoping to get at least that far with her — Sandoval launched into a trumpet solo that he titled ‘Marianela.’ The scene, which appears at the beginning of the 2000 HBO movie For Love or Country, shows a dewy-eyed Marianela (Mia Maestro) relent towards Sandoval. They married in 1975.
The couple had a son, Arturo Jr. In the following years, Sandoval vowed to provide the best life for his family in the given circumstances. Marianela was reluctant to leave. The Cuban government was determined to hold on to their prized asset. “Life was tough. After I got married, I did not want to escape that much anymore because it would have meant leaving my family behind,” Sandoval says. Opportunities of a getaway were also slim.
In July 1990, when Sandoval was in Rome on a tour of Europe with Gillespie, his family was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom. In the absence of Cuban officials to chaperone and monitor their movements, Marianela and the kids went into hiding in London. After a long and emotional telephone call with his wife, Sandoval decided to walk up to Gillespie’s room and ask for help. It was midnight.
“I woke him up, it was 1-something in the morning … Dizzy said, ‘Get my wallet there. I got a business card. I’m going to use it now,’” Sandoval told Public Radio International (PRI) in an earlier interview. A pajama-clad Gillespie handed him the business card of Dan Quayle, the then-United States Vice President. He also got on the line to call in a favour with the White House.
During the Cold War, successive U.S. Presidents wrangled money from Congress to send cultural groups abroad as a part of “public diplomacy” efforts. Capella singers, jazz musicians, symphony orchestras and theatre groups were sent to capture the imagination of people in non-aligned countries like Egypt and India. The Soviets responded in kind by sending cultural attaches of their own. The best ballet dancers and musicians who performed at national institutions like the Bolshoi theatre were handpicked and sent on tours abroad.
Dizzy Gillespie, like other jazz musicians who toured on behalf of the State Department, was in two minds. The ham-handed attitude of the United States government in dealing with the Civil Rights Movement had rankled large sections of the African American population. However, as a patriotic American, he wanted his country to win the Cold War.
Gillespie cast aside reservations about how he might be perceived by his native constituency. As a member of a U.S. government entourage, he toured Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. The concerts were a great success. The gospel of jazz helped proselytize the leaders of these countries and bring them over to the anti-communist fold.
When Gillespie put in a word with the White House on his friend’s behalf, the American embassies in Italy and the U.K. opened their doors to the Sandovals. Arturo and Marianela made it to New York on two separate flights from London and Rome respectively.
Unacquainted with frosty winters in the American north, the couple moved to Miami, Florida, a city crisscrossed by roads lined with palm fronds, and famous for its warm weather. Barely 300 miles from the Cuban coastline, Miami was teeming with immigrants from the island — some of whom defectors, while others were individuals ejected from the country by the Castro administration. The influx of Cubans altered the status quo in Miami and was the subject of many gangster movies including the gangland opus Scarface.
“Oh yeah, yeah, about the Cubans in Miami… We are not too happy about the movie Scarface. We, Cubans are not happy because they portrayed us a bunch of criminals without scruples. That don’t create a good image for Cuban people,” Sandoval says, about the Al Pacino starrer.
Granted a new lease of life, Sandoval immersed himself in jazz and set about composing new songs with a passion. “I also experimented with other genres. I play some Cuban music, some Afro-Cuban jazz, some combinations of these. I love funk. I love blues. I play the piano. As a performer, your mission is to try and entertain the people, make them have fun and enjoy the music you are doing,” he says.
After being granted U.S. citizenship in 1998, Sandoval attended many jazz festivals around the world and composed music for Hollywood movies. In 1995, he became one of the first foreign-born musicians to perform at the NFL Super Bowl halftime show — a quarter-hour pause in play that has become the biggest marketing opportunity for advertisers and a red-letter day for American pop culture.
Sandoval has also collaborated with younger pop stars like Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake, and composed soundtracks for the screen. “Last year, I wrote the score for a Clint Eastwood film, The Mule. Next month, there is going to another one, Richard Jewell [which is also directed by Clint Eastwood],” he says. But Sandoval’s foray into mainstream music has not kept him from being a prolific jazz exponent.
A happenstance encounter in Eastern Europe brought him in contact with Willis Conover, the bespectacled host of Jazz Hour on the Voice of America.
“Oh my god, when I listened to his show during my military service in Cuba, I never knew I would see him. I couldn’t believe it. I met him in Poland, at the Warsaw Jazz Festival, and told him that story. I ran into him there a couple of times. He used to come every year. He was the emcee of the festival,” Sandoval says.
“We travel all over, you know. And I’m so happy to be here — my first time in India,” he adds. Sandoval is visibly jetlagged. He sits plopped in his chair like a sack of spuds, and sucks on a drink that was lying untouched for the past half hour. A ring of water forms on the lacquered wooden table where his glass was sitting idle. Water droplets slide down a can of Schweppes tonic like cold sweat.
“I was so tired after breakfast that I thought I’d crash for a bit. Do you know I did? I watched The Irishman for three-and-a-half hours. De Niro and Al Pacino… oh my goodness, they are such fantastic actors. But do you know what really bothered me in The Irishman? They didn’t use many original scores. The soundtrack had a lot of old songs from the 40s and 50s, but nothing new,” he says.
The jazz legend is all praise for Bollywood movies though, given Indian producers’ penchant for song-and-dance sequences. “I have seen a few Bollywood movies. They use a lot of music in the movies and that is great. I love that,’ he says, adding that film music in India could do with a touch of jazz.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, signaling the end of the Cold War. The “voice of the imperialists” cracked as the new world order entered into its adolescence. Jazz, which was identified as a quintessentially American genre, was replaced by rock, and then pop in the collective imagination.
“In 20 years’ time, if I’m still alive, I will be 90 years old. I don’t know where jazz is going to be,” he concedes.
In 2001, the Apple iPod ushered in a new era in music consumption. Users could now toggle between Justin Bieber and Johannes Bach with the press of a button. Music became a popularity contest. “The last 15–20 years has not been a good time for quality music. They go for the easy thing these days. Everything is way too commercial and superficial,” Sandoval says. Pop stars, like middle-brow writers, became rich overnight. Musicians aspiring for higher ideals were relegated to the bottom of the billboard rankings and left to survive on ticket sales from concerts.
“Life is generally so fast. People don’t have time for anything. And they don’t want to do anything which makes them think. They want something easy and frivolous when they go to listen to music,” Sandoval says.
Music festivals are still a big draw, but the limelight has largely been hogged by latex-clad celebrities, embalmed in makeup, and given to performing histrionics like wiggling their behinds or waving their hands whilst lip-syncing songs about love and other drugs.
Jazz is a broad church, spanning subgenres like punk jazz, ragtime, and bebop, but even these new denominations have proved incapable of preventing the ranks of the believers from thinning. “Jazz is not music put in the elevator or in a café where people go to talk, like a Mozart or Mahler symphony. You have to pay attention know what is going on the stage, what the musician is transmitting to you and you have to really pay attention to that to catch the meaning.
“It is a small group of people that appreciate, understand, and follow jazz. This is our salvation. We love those people, because without them, the music is going to be dead, you know. But there are times when you go somewhere and the hall is sold out. We play at a lot of jazz clubs as well, besides theatres and festivals. Not many of them we feel are always sold out but even then there are people who are enthusiastic and appreciate the music a lot. They are our favourite people,” Sandoval says.
Three decades after escaping the short leash of the Cuban government, Sandoval has a Pavlovian hatred for communism. “Oh my god, I don’t know. I suffered so much there, man. And I lived poor, we all did,” he says, highlighting the tendency of ideologues to wag the dog by filibustering at international forums to mask their failures at home.
When Fidel Castro died in November 2016, Sandoval took to Facebook to pen a waspish obituary. “The dictator of Cuba has died!!!!!FINALLY!!!! I’m happy that they’ll cremate him. At least his bones will not contaminate the ground. I thought that when this day arrived I would be jumping on one foot for hours, but unfortunately what I’m thinking now is about so many people that lost their lives because of him. I think that he’ll not even be admitted in hell,” Sandoval wrote in a blog post.
“This year, I would have lived 31 years in the U.S., and I love the country, my family and all. Our lives changed so much in the last 30 years that we have no room for nostalgia. We are enjoying the ride, you know — what is going on now. Because to live in the past is not too good. We cannot change anything from the past.
“What happened yesterday… we have no control. What is going to happen tomorrow… we have no control. But today, we have a little bit of control. That is what I have been trying to tell myself all my life. Focus on 24 hours at a time and do as good a job as you can,” he says.
When not on the road, Sandoval, a sprightly septuagenarian, divides his time between his studio and the Miami home he shares with his wife and their canine menagerie. Lucy lives in the barn. They are his first audience.
“You have to imagine the kind of sound that you want to produce. If you can conceive a melody, hear it in your head, you should pursue it, try your best to realize that sound with your instrument. You have to imagine that sound first,” he says.
“I didn’t go to any school. I learnt whatever I learnt on the streets. I got a street education, but it doesn’t really count because we can go to a wonderful school but when you approach life, it is not a school anymore. That is the reality,” Sandoval says, bringing his soliloquy to an abrupt halt.
He quietly drains the last dregs of his drink. A lime wedge sits on a bed of half-melted ice cubes like a lifebuoy at the shallow end of a pool.
Arturo Sandoval leans back and, momentarily, looks content in the silence.
