San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BUSTING BORDERS
Grammy Award winner Arturo O’farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra made history in 2018 with their ‘Fandango at the Wall’ concert; now San Diegans can relive the moment with a film, discussion and performance
Lights! Action! Send in the dancing horse! Oops, never mind. That was, more or less, what happened on May 25, 2018, when four-time Grammy Award winner Arturo O’farrill, his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and a star-studded lineup of musical guests were rehearsing for their wildly ambitious “Fandango at the Wall” concert and documentary. Held the next day on the Tijuana side of Friendship Park at the U.s.-mexico border, the filmed performance featured genre-blurring musicians from the U.S., Mexico, Iran, Iraq and points in between. The impromptu jam session with the horse began when its owner walked the stallion down the street in front of Tijuana’s Casa de la Cultura Playas, where O’farrill was leading a concert rehearsal. Faster than you can say “Whoa, Nelly,” O’farrill dashed out to chat with the horse’s trainer. He was joined moments later by violinist Regina Carter, saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-brown and violin-playing brothers Luis and Alberto Villalobos, among others. On the spur of the moment, the musicians played, the horse swayed, then began moving more animatedly on all four legs.
Alas, the film crew was not present, so the only footage captured was on O’farrill’s phone. An attempt to re-create the hoof-friendly sonic interplay the next day for the film crew in the courtyard of the Casa was quickly shelved, after the horse’s owner expressed concern about the floor being too slippery for his steed.
“I really felt the horse was responding to the music; it was, literally, an inter-species jam session!” said O’farrill, who returns with his New York-based orchestra on Saturday for a “Fandango at the Wall” concert that is part of the San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at the Jacobs series.
Saturday’s horse-free performance will be held two days after the 27th annual San Diego Latino Film Festival’s “work in progress” screening of the 93-minute documentary “Fandango at the Wall” on Thursday at AMC Fashion Valley. Directed by Varda Bar-kar, the movie was executive-produced by music legend Quincy Jones, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, best-selling author Kabir Sehgal and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Carlos Santana, a former Tijuana resident.
In between the Thursday screening and the Saturday concert comes “Music and the Border,” a free Friday evening panel discussion at the downtown San Diego Library, co-presented by the library and UC San Diego’s Helen Edison Lecture Series.
The panelists will include: the Mexico City-born O’farrill, now in his second year as a professor of global jazz studies at UCLA’S Herb Alpert School of Music; Grammy-winning Queztal band singer Martha Gonzalez, an associate professor of Chicano/latino studies at Scripps/clairemont Colleges; veteran radio journalist Betto Arcos; and son jarocho Mexican string-music champion Jorge Francisco Castillo, a retired Chula Vista librarian, who was born in Texas and now lives in Tijuana.
Castillo is the founder of the annual Fandango Fronterizo music festival, which will celebrate its 13th anniversary on May 23. Held concurrently on the Tijuana side of the U.s.-mexico border and at San Diego’s adjacent Friendship Park, the festival inspired the 2018 “Fandango at the Wall” concert and soon-to-debut film documentary of the same name.
‘You’re a Democrat, I’m a Republican’
O’farrill cites a 2016 New York Times article about Castillo’s annual Fandango Fronterizo concerts as his impetus for what became the film and 2018’s two-cd album “Fandango at the Wall: A Soundtrack for the United States, Mexico and Beyond.” It was followed by the 2018 CD and book “Fandango at the Wall: Creating Harmony Between the United States and Mexico,” a joint effort by Sehgal and O’farrill. Sehgal is the author of such bestsellers as “A Bucket of Blessings” and “Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us.”
“The easiest part of all this was the integration of the musicians, because — no matter where we are from — we all speak the same language,” O’farrill said, speaking recently from Los Angeles.
“The most difficult part was the production of such a large and weighty event, with so many producers, executive producers and differing agendas. When you have 20 collaborators, your vision has to be flexible and pliant so that enough of it comes through in the long run. I don’t mean this begrudgingly, because it’s the true nature of collaboration.”
For Fandango Fronterizo creator Castillo, the first key to collaborating with O’farrill was the suspension of disbelief.
“I did not know who Arturo was when he first contacted me,” said Castillo, a retired San Diego and Chula Vista librarian. “But when he told me he is the the son of (famed Afro-cuban music band leader) Chico O’farrill, I said: ‘Oh, you’re kidding!’ Then I looked Arturo up online. I was surprised, and shocked, that somebody with his credentials was even looking at doing something with the Fandango Fronterizo.”
“Every single moment of this project was a surprise,” agreed O’farrill. “And the
biggest surprise of all is that we pulled it off !”
Part of the “Fandango at the Wall” documentary chronicles Castillo and O’farrill’s trip to the Mexician
city of Vera Cruz, where they visited some of the leading son jarocho musicians who have performed at Fandango Fronterizo.
By that point, the film was a reality for Castillo, who leads the Tijuana son jarocho band Radio Guacamaya. But when he and O’farrill first got together in Tijuana to discuss working together, Castillo had some doubts.
“To be honest,” he recalled, “even after I met Arturo, I still thought he was dreaming and that what he was proposing would be very difficult to accomplish. But, little by little, things started to happen and escalate. I don’t know if he knew exactly what would happen. But Arturo is a great person with a great heart, and he has been around the music and entertainment world a lot more than us.
“Arturo has done so many things for so many people. He loves to connect people with music and he doesn’t believe in borders, which is the whole principle of the Fandango Fronterizo concerts and the new ‘Fandango at the Wall’ documentary. We want to not only end political borders, but the borders between different musics, races and philosophies that we carry between ourselves. ‘You’re a Democrat, I’m a Republican.’ ‘I’m a Christian, you’re a Buddhist.’ ‘You like jazz, I like rock.’ But we’re all humans and we have the tendency to create all these borders between ourselves.”
‘A lot of borders I want to crush’
O’farrill is outspoken in his opposition to the border wall that separates the U.S. and Mexico, describing it as “an insanely ancient solution to a modern-day problem.” But he approached the making of the “Fandango at the Wall” album as an opportunity to also challenge other, more aesthetic borders.
Accordingly, the nearly three dozen musical selections on the two-cd release are a mix of live recordings from the 2018 border concert that O’farrill led, subsequent recording studio sessions in New York, and a 2019 concert of the same music at Manhattan’s Symphony Space.
“There are a lot of borders I want to crush, including the border between jazz and son jarocho music,” he said, “And ‘technological recording purity’ is another one of them. My belief is that it’s the music that matters and the recording should serve and enhance the music, not be the centerpiece. Some of the best things I ever heard are not on vinyl or in digital form, with floors clanking, dogs barking and life taking place.”
Life unmistakably took place when he and his orchestra performed their free “Fandago at the Wall” concert in 2018, beginning when their electrical generator broke down before a note of music was played. A lamp post half a block away was quickly jury-rigged as an alternate source of electricity, and the concert commenced.
Much of the music that was performed will be showcased at Saturday’s concert at Copley Symphony Hall, where the guest artists will include the San Diego State University Chamber Choir, Quetzal singer Martha Gonzalez, Jose Flores and a group of son jarocho artists that features Fandango Fronterizo founder Castillo, Jacob Hernández and Luis Sarmiento. (Plans for a second performance in Tijuana failed to materialize.)
“We’ll definitely begin by playing ‘El Siquisiri, which is the way all fandangos begin,” O’farrill said. “Then we’ll create an order based on how the room feels and the vibe of the space and the audience.”
An American citizen who was born in Mexico City, O’farrill has long shared Castillo’s quest to bring people together with music. He firmly believes artists have a duty to speak out on social and political issues.
“Nobody would ask a plumber why they have a proor anti-trump bumper sticker on the back of their truck,” O’farrill said.
“The arts humanize us and give us the ability to see beyond ourselves. Artists are not more important than anyone else — absolutely not! — and nobody’s opinion matters more than anybody else’s. What matters is the journalistic importance of art. Our goal is to report what we see. And if what we see is beautiful, or ugly, or fascist, that’s what we report. I’m doing the same thing Billie Holiday did with ‘Strange Fruit,’ Charles Mingus did with ‘Fables of Faubus’ and Beethoven did with his Eroica Symphony. There’s a precedent for artists to be truth-tellers. And if it offends people, I’m sorry, but that’s the wrong response to an ancient and venerable tradition.”