By Tanya Mercado
NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Music has the power to heal and to feed the soul. It crosses borders and unites people. It celebrates life and culture.
Enter six-time Grammy Award winner Arturo O'Farrill, whose Afro Latin Jazz music celebrates Hispanic heritage.
As the Mexico City-born O'Farrill, 59, told 1010 WINS ahead of the kick-off of Hispanic Heritage Month, "we live in a multicultural society and we must all celebrate one another's diversity."
And celebrating diversity is exactly what his Afro Latin Jazz orchestra does.
Afro Latin Jazz embraces the rhythms of Latin America, Spain and Africa. There are hints of bomba and plena, cumbia and merengue music in O'Farrill's music. If you ask him to define it, he describes jazz as a "powerful song of deliverance" and "a rallying cry of survival."
O'Farrill, who lives in New York with his pianist wife Alison Deane and their two sons -- Zachary, a drummer, and Adam, a trumpeter -- understands the importance of celebrating one's culture.
If you ask him what that means, he will tell you, "I think that as a people we need to recognize that we do exist in this vast, vast array of countries and geographies and we can't separate. Especially not now, in this day and age we can't see ourselves as Bolivian but I'm not Colombian but I'm not this but I'm not that. We are Latinos."
O'Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz orchestra perform at Birdland Jazz Club in the Theater District on Sundays at 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Visit www.afrolatinjazz.org to learn more about what the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance is doing to continue the music of afro Latin jazz by teaching young people and to help provide music education programs to schools.
