Chico O'Farrill stood at the center of the Afro-Cuban and Latin currents that swept through jazz during the closing years of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s. His refined arrangements for Latin big bands in the first half of the decade often projected a forceful, brass-heavy intensity, yet he could also evoke a refined, near-classical atmosphere in works such as "Angels' Flight" while handling extended structures with assurance, as demonstrated by the pioneering "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suites."
He first picked up the trumpet during military school in Georgia and returned to Cuba already devoted to jazz after exposure to leading American big bands. In Havana he pursued formal studies in composition and fronted his own ensemble before relocating to New York City in 1948, where he quickly established himself through scores written for Benny Goodman ("Undercurrent Blues"), Stan Kenton ("Cuban Episode"), and Machito ("Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite"). Between 1950 and 1954 he cut six vigorous 10-inch LPs of Latin and American big-band jazz for Clef and Norgran, later compiled on the Verve two-CD collection Cuban Blues; during the same period his own band performed at Birdland and toured across the United States. Late in the decade he settled in Mexico City, then came back to New York in 1965 to serve as arranger and music director for the television program Festival of the Lively Arts and to prepare charts for Count Basie. Drawing on his classical background, he also composed orchestral works including "Three Cuban Dances" and "Symphony No. 1." Although he continued supplying material to Machito, Kenton, Gato Barbieri, and Dizzy Gillespie through the 1970s, no further sessions appeared under his own name between 1966 and 1995, when he returned with undiminished creative force on the Milestone album Pure Emotion. Two additional Milestone releases followed, the final one being Carambola, issued in October 2000. Eight months afterward, on June 27, 2001, Arturo "Chico" O'Farrill passed away in a New York hospital.
