Arturo Sandoval releases new album "Sangú"

Cuban jazz legend Arturo Sandoval released his new album, "Sangú," a Spanglish title he translates as "sounds good," and the record now sits on the release calendar alongside a four night residency he opened at the Blue Note jazz club in Hollywood in June. Now 77, Sandoval played trumpet, timbales and piano throughout the record and recorded his own scat vocals on the track "Scat."

Sandoval grew up playing trumpet in Cuba's national band, where the government branded jazz "Yankee imperialism," and he served three and a half months in jail in the 1970s after he was caught listening to Voice of America broadcasts of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He and pianist Chucho Valdés later pioneered an Afro-Cuban fusion with the group Irakere, which won a Grammy for best Latin recording in 1980, before Sandoval defected from Cuba in 1990 while touring Europe with Gillespie.

In the decades since, Sandoval has collected 10 Grammy awards, an Emmy for scoring the film "For Love or Country," and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him by President Obama in 2013. Last month he added a knighthood from the king of Spain, an honor he traces to grandparents who emigrated from Tenerife and Galicia.

This year Sandoval joined Colombian star Karol G onstage at Coachella after she invited him to play trumpet on her album "Ivonny Bonita," a set he called nerve wracking in front of more than 150,000 people a night. He is also booked to perform July 4 at the America250 concert in Washington D.C., a bipartisan celebration of the country's 250th birthday co-chaired by former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Sandoval said the album grew out of writing two or three new songs a day for two and a half years during the pandemic, out of which his son and daughter-in-law, who manages him, picked the dozen tracks that made the final cut. He did not say what comes after the current world tour, only that he still practices the trumpet every day at 77 because, in his words, the instrument "sends you a bill" if you skip a day.