Join us for a CoPA Artist Hour featuring School of Jazz and Contemporary Music faculty members, pianists and composers Arturo O'Farrill and Emilio Solla.  

ARTURO O’FARRILL, pianist, composer, and educator, was born in Mexico and grew up in New York City. Arturo’s professional career began with the Carla Bley Band and continued as a solo performer with a wide spectrum of artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Belafonte.

In 2007, he founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, education, and preservation of Afro Latin music. Learn more about ALJA here: http://www.afrolatinjazz.org

Arturo is a six-time Grammy winner and has been nominated for two additional Grammy awards for 2021 for his most recent album FOUR QUESTIONS (Zoho)

In 2020 Arturo’s weekly concerts with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, dubbed “Virtual Birdland,” top the list of 10 Best Quarantine Concerts in the New York Times. Arturo is Professor of Global Jazz Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and has been honored as a Steinway Artist for many years.

Two-time Grammy nominee, Argentine-born and NY-based pianist and composer Emilio Solla's first band, Apertura, (1983-1989) was praised by Astor Piazzolla as one of the most interesting new sounds in the Buenos Aires scene in 1986. Nowadays, with eleven CDs as band leader and more than forty as arranger/producer, he is regarded by peers and critics as one of the most outstanding and personal composers in the Tango-Jazz field, a musical language which blends Argentine tango and folk with jazz and other contemporary music styles. He has performed all around Europe, Japan, the US and Latin America in many of the most important Jazz houses and festivals, such as Bim Huis, Lincoln Center, Marciac, Blue Note, Fasching and more.

Presented by the College of Performing Arts.