Your browser is not supported.

doing something a bit odd: I went to a concert. By myself. But before I get into that story, let me give you a bit of background.

Even if you know me, you may not know that I’m a big fan of Latin jazz/mambo music, while at the same time being a complete neophyte. I don’t own much of it, but I love it, and know just enough about the genre to recognize the big names in the field: Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, to name a couple.

Another luminary in Latin jazz, Arturo Sandoval is an enormously talented trumpeter, one often mentioned in the same breath with such greats as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. And when I found out that he and his band were playing a week-long engagement at Yoshi’s Jazz Club here in San Francisco, I flipped out. I’d been looking for an excuse to go to Yoshi’s here or in in Oakland for a while, and this was the perfect one.

Unfortunately, of the six friends I asked to join me, all were either uninterested (?!) or unavailable. But as I wasn’t about to let a little thing like that cheat me out of the chance to go see a living legend in person, I decided to go anyway. And the show was worth. Every. Penny.

Live music is always better than recorded music, but the improvisational nature of jazz lends itself uniquely to the truly great live music experience, which this was. Sandoval was spectacular, and was playing with a truly gifted group of musicians—each backup trumpeter was a master in his own right, and the saxophonist! There are no words.

Now, I knew going in that Sandoval was a great—some would argue the greatest—trumpeter, but what I didn’t know was that he’s a hell of a pianist as well. Other than his final number, a gorgeous rendition of Mambo Caliente, which he composed for the Mambo Kings soundtrack (the record that seriously got me into all this), the highlight of the evening was him sitting at the piano performing a piece he wrote and dedicated to recently deceased piano legend Oscar Peterson. If I hadn’t heard him bring the room to its feet with his trumpet just minutes before, I would have thought he’d devoted his whole life to studying the piano—he was that good.

The show was just phenomenal. Loved it loved it loved it.