Ryan Benk and Scott Simon (NPR) review trumpeter and Cuban jazz performer Arturo Sandoval and his 49th album, Sangú. We should add that Sangú debuted the first week of May and it immediately became the #1 Most Added album on both JazzWeek and NACC Jazz.
Jazz maestro and Afro-Cuban music legend Arturo Sandoval’s obsession with sound began at the age of 13 in the small town of Artemisa in western Cuba. Now 76, Sandoval boasts a history that includes being mentored by Dizzy Gillespie, winning 10 Grammys and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and collaborating with towering figures like Stevie Wonder and the “Queen of Salsa” herself, the late Celia Cruz.
But on his 49th studio album, “SANGÚ,” Sandoval turns inward, with a little help from his family. His son, Arturo “Tury” Sandoval III, and daughter-in-law, Melody Lisman, helped conceive and produce the album. “They came one day to my house and said ‘you know what? We have an idea,’” Sandoval says. “‘You need something different. You need to refresh your repertoire.’ And I said okay.” [. . .] “I started composing new tunes and making videos every day. For two and a half years, I was doing that, and I wrote a few hundreds new songs,”
Sandoval III and Lisman selected 100 of those songs and then came back to the older Sandoval and told him to choose just 12 to record for the new album.
Sandoval’s famous trumpet peppers the entire album with classic bebop, funk and Afro-Cuban stylings that made him famous, but it also sounds unmistakably modern, as if he’s reaching back into his history and plucking notes specifically to pass on to future generations.[. . .]
After recording the first track on the album, he turned to his son and daughter-in-law and said, “It sounds good.”
“They started laughing so hard,” Sandoval recalls. ” I said, ‘what is funny about it?’ I said ‘it sounds good.’”
“They said ‘no, you didn’t say that. You said S-A-N-G-U with an accent.’ SANGÚ.” [. . .]
Like Lazarus, hope springs eternal
One of the most recognizably Cuban songs on “SANGÚ,” and one of the only tracks that features Arturo Sandoval’s speaking voice, is called “Babalu Ayé.” It’s dedicated to the Catholic Saint Lazarus, or San Lázaro in Spanish – a man Jesus rose from the dead.
“We are very devoted to San Lázaro,” Sandoval says. “We light candles, we pray, and we ask San Lázaro for health.”
For full article, go to NPR at https://www.npr.org/2026/05/02/nx-s1-5791712/on-sangu-arturo-sandoval-reaches-back-and-pays-it-forward
[Photo of Alberto Sandoval above by Joseph Gray.]
Ryan Benk and Scott Simon (NPR) review trumpeter and Cuban jazz performer Arturo Sandoval and his 49th album, Sangú. We should add that Sangú debuted the first week of May and it immediately became the #1 Most Added album on both JazzWeek and NACC Jazz. Jazz maestro and Afro-Cuban music legend Arturo Sandoval’s obsession with