If you know the name O'Farrill at all, you probably know it from Chico O'Farrill (1965), the Cuban composer whose big band charts for Machito and Dizzy Gillespie basically wrote the rulebook for Latin jazz orchestration. Arturo is his son, and for a long time he ran from that connection — playing in downtown New York bands, working with Carla Bley, chasing a more avant-garde path than anything his father ever touched.

Then in the late 1990s he did an about-face. He started leading his father's old band, learned the book inside and out, and eventually built his own ensemble, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, as a permanent home for this music rather than a one-off tribute. That's the thing people miss about him: he's not a nostalgia act. He writes new charts, commissions new composers, and pushes the band into territory his father's generation never imagined, mixing in odd meters, extended modern harmony, and material that reaches past Cuba into Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, wherever the rhythm takes him.

As a pianist he's sturdy and percussive, comfortable laying down montunos but just as happy to break from the clave and stretch out with dissonance when the arrangement calls for it. He's never been the flashiest soloist in the room — the real instrument is the orchestra itself, and he conducts it like someone who grew up hearing these voicings at the dinner table. His album Live in Brooklyn (2009) won a Grammy and is a good entry point: full band, full energy, no studio polish hiding the sweat.

He's also become one of the genre's most visible advocates, teaching, mentoring young Latin jazz composers, and arguing loudly that this music deserves the same institutional respect as the straight-ahead jazz canon. That advocacy sometimes gets more attention than the records themselves, which is a shame, because the records are good — dense, well-arranged, unafraid of length and ambition.

O'Farrill isn't reinventing Afro-Cuban jazz so much as refusing to let it calcify into museum music. He keeps commissioning new work, keeps hiring young players, keeps the whole tradition moving instead of freezing it at the point where his father left off. That's not a small thing, even if it's not a flashy one.