Sandoval’s music melds the best of both worlds

IT’S a fair bet that Arturo Sandoval will hit some of the highest notes heard at this year’s 29th installment of the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. The range, power and imaginativeness of his trumpet playing are among the wonders of contemporary jazz.

It’s an equally worthwhile wager that some of the festival’s most heated sounds will be generated by Sandoval’s Mambo Mania Big Band -- one of the weekend program’s three acts celebrating the diversity of Latin jazz. Sandoval’s ensemble, which combines his percussion-heavy six-piece group with a horn section drawn from the Southland’s best A-list musicians, will play some numbers from Machito’s breakout mambo band of the early ‘50s, as well as Sandoval’s own originals. Much of the music will drawn from his recently released CD, “Rumba Palace.”

Sandoval’s performance serves as a symbolic bridge between the festival’s mainstream jazz -- amply present in the work of such groups as the Phil Woods Quintet, the Randy Brecker-Bill Evans Soulbop Band and the Terence Blanchard and Marcus Miller ensembles -- and the Latin stylings of Johnny Polanco y Su Conjunto Amistad and timba master Issac Delgado.

The festival, of course, also extends to blues, ballads, smooth jazz and African rhythms -- a smorgasbord that underscores jazz’s capacity to absorb, enhance and combine sounds and rhythms from a seemingly limitless range of styles and cultures.

Sandoval, however, is not pleased with the labeling that has created the “Latin jazz” genre.

“I’m not too happy with it,” he said last week in a phone call from his Miami home. “Somebody changed the name of Afro Cuban jazz and started to call it Latin jazz. And that’s not right. Because the people who invented it called it Afro Cuban jazz. When you mix it up correctly, when you’ve got a serious bebop player in the band and a good, solid rhythm section, that combination is fantastic, the essence of both styles, of both worlds.”

Sandoval’s sentiments are echoed by actor-director-musician Andy Garcia, who portrayed the trumpeter in the 2000 biopic “For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story.”

“It’s just like saying ‘salsa,’ ” said Garcia, who performs on percussion and piano with his own ensemble, the Cineson All-Stars, on Tuesday at Catalina Bar & Grill. “All the rhythms that are played in salsa are Cuban rhythms. But salsa is just a marketing term to remarket the rumba, the son, the mambo, the cha cha cha. Latin jazz is similar -- a new marketing term to broaden out the title so it’s not so specific. But if it’s not Afro Cuban jazz, what are you listening to? It’s like Arturo says -- jazz structures or melodies put against Cuban rhythms.”

NOMENCLATURE aside, Sandoval -- like his mentor and inspiration, Dizzy Gillespie -- is a dedicated believer in the notion that jazz, Afro Cuban or otherwise, can be both entertaining and inventive, foot-tapping swinging and body-moving danceable.

“We’re going to have some dancers on stage to dance the mambo, and I hope the audience dances too,” he said. “In the swing era, in the ‘40s, and even in the bebop era, people used to go to the clubs to dance. In fact, when I was a kid in Havana, the Rumba Palace was a place near the school where I studied music. People used to go there to here mambo and rumba. So when I was planning the new record, I knew I had to use that name. And the same goes for my Mambo Mania Big Band. Getting people to move, to feel the music.”

Garcia doesn’t have any doubt that Sandoval will accomplish that task.

“He’s amazing. He can do just about anything he wants,” Garcia said. “Start with the fact that he plays both trumpet and piano at an incredible level of musicianship. That alone puts him in the category of a prodigy.

“But then there’s his scat singing.”

Those skills endear Sandoval to fans who share the deep love of music that is part and parcel of who he is, as an artist, a person and as an expatriate from his home country.

“Music was one of the ways -- whether you were playing or listening -- to escape the frustration and misery and hopelessness of the island,” he said.

“We owe so many things to music, because it saved our souls.

“So when I go on stage at Playboy, or anywhere, I’m always aware of the power that music can have. I want it to be as good as I can make it. But I don’t have any pretensions to discover some new thing or be too sophisticated.

“I just want to make happy, exciting music.”

weekend@latimes.com

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Playboy Jazz Festival

When: 2:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

Price: $17.50 to $130

Info: (323) 850-2000; full lineups at www.hollywoodbowl.com