Arturo Sandoval is a renowned and celebrated Cuban jazz trumpeter and pianist. He was born on November 6, 1949, in Artemisa, Havana, Cuba.
Graduated from the National School of Art, he was part of the Cuban Modern Music Orchestra and in 1974 was one of the first members, alongside saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, of the renowned Cuban jazz orchestra Irakere, founded and directed by pianist and composer Chucho Valdés. With Irakere, Sandoval achieved great worldwide success.
At the end of the 1970s, he met in Havana Dizzy Gillespie, one of the most significant figures in the development of modern jazz and an experimenter of Afro-Cuban jazz. Alongside Gillespie, he played with the radio and television orchestra of Finland, and in New York, he performed at the Village Gate with the trumpeter Jon Faddis, a student of the American musician. In 1990, he was a member of the United Nations Orchestra, led by the North American musician.
In 1981, he founded his own group. He has been invited as a soloist to numerous orchestras and has shared the stage with jazz greats such as Maynard Ferguson, Stan Getz, Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, the Cuban Jorge Luis Prats, among others.
He has participated in jazz festivals in Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and England; at Ronnie Scott's club in England, and at New Morning in Geneva. As a composer and performer, he has several film soundtracks to his credit, including "Vampires in Havana I," "The Pérez Family," "The Kings of Mambo," and "Havana."
He emigrated to the United States in 1990, settling in Miami. There, he was a professor at Florida International University and recorded his first album in 1991: "Flight to Freedom" for the GRP label.
In April 2006, he opened a music venue in Miami Beach called The Arturo Sandoval Jazz Club, where stars of the genre, including Sandoval himself, have performed.
Sandoval is highly regarded and influential within the Cuban community in Florida due to his vehement statements against the Cuban government and his support for the recently emerged movements in Cuba that strive for change on the island. He joined the calls for the release of the activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. The musician has been unable to return to Cuba for 31 years.
In July 2020, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood alongside Cubans Ana de Armas and casting director Libia Batista Mora.
He has won the Grammy nine times and has been nominated 17 times. He has also won 6 Billboard awards and an Emmy award.
In 2018, he stated in an interview with the Argentine branch of Billboard: “I would like to someday return to a Cuba where human rights are respected, but I don't think I'll see it. I'm no longer 20; I'm turning 70... I hope that someday before I die, I can return and see a prosperous Cuba.”
Sandoval himself once revealed that during the 1970s, when he was a young twenty-something completing his three years of mandatory military service, he was imprisoned for listening to jazz on a foreign station.
In January 2020, the official Cuban press referred to him as a "repentant communist."
Sandoval was one of the guests at a virtual meeting organized by the European Parliament under the title 'Homeland and Life, art and politics united for Cuba,' which was broadcast live on YouTube. The event also featured artists Yotuel Romero, Willy Chirino, Gente de Zona, Anamely Ramos and scientist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola.
