Arturo Sandoval Biography

Arturo Sandoval was born in 1949 in Cuba. Young Arturo fell in love with jazz and the trumpet while he was still a teenager, and studied the instrument classically until he was drafted into the military in the early 1970’s. Although his years in service disrupted an ability to launch a career as a musician, Sandoval continued to practice and play and in the late 1970’s he formed the band Irakere and caught the attention of Columbia Records.

Although Arturo recorded with Irakere until the early 1980’s, he left Irakere in 1981 and struck out on his own, touring worldwide and performing alongside some of the world’s most renowned symphony orchestras. Since that time, Arturo  Sandoval has continued his career as a jazz trumpeter well into the new millennium, recording dozens of albums and performing live, often alongside such notables as Celine Dion, Alicia Keys, Kenny G, Gloria Estefan, and even Justin Timberlake.

Sandoval’s albums recorded with Dizzy Gillespie (including To a Finland Station, 1982, and Live at the Royal Festival Hall, 1990) are among his most famous, and his relationship with Gillespie has been among the most important to him personally. Dizzy Gillespie even inadvertently assisted Arturo Sandoval’s American citizenship, by bringing him on tour with him in the early 1990’s, at point at when Sandoval defected in Spain and became a naturalized American citizen in 1999. In 2016, Arturo Sandoval opened the Arturo Sandoval Jazz Club in Miami Beach, and although it was only open for two years, it featured such notable performers as Roberta Flack, Michael Lington, and Joshua Redman.

Thus far in his career, Arturo Sandoval has earned seventeen Grammy nominations with nine wins. His life story was the subject of a 2000 television film (For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story), and in 2013, he was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.