10/05/2024
One of the world’s greatest living jazz artists, trumpeter, pianist and composer Arturo Sandoval is set to become a 2024 Kennedy Center Honoree, the nation’s pre-eminent performing arts award, in December.
The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient has such a remarkable story, it’s been made into a movie, “For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story.”
As a young man, Sandoval was jailed in communist Cuba for listening to a Voice of America jazz program during mandatory military service. Sandoval’s life changed when his hero, jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, visited Cuba in 1977. It was while touring with Gillespie in 1989 that Sandoval defected to the U.S., and he credits the musical giant with helping secure his freedom.
“I was a hopeless kid in Cuba, and then music changed me and my life completely. Music saved my life,” he said.
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