Oct 28, 2025 10:47 AM
In Memoriam: Jack DeJohnette, 1942–2025
Jack DeJohnette, a bold and resourceful drummer and NEA Jazz Master who forged a unique vocabulary on the kit over his…
Charlie Sepúlveda is planning to restart the Luquillo Beach Jazz Festival on a larger scale.
(Photo: Gulnara Khamatova)The morning after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, trumpeter Charlie Sepúlveda looked around his town of Luquillo and saw mostly destruction. His reflections on that disaster come through on “Estampas,” which brings together jazz and his island’s danza, aiming to preserve what may become lost as the song’s title, translated as “Pictures,” denotes. The track appears on Sepúlveda’s 2021 album This Is Latin Jazz (HighNote), but his musical conservation work includes more than composition.
This album is part of Sepúlveda’s preservation efforts. Last autumn, he completed building the C-Note, a multipurpose jazz club in his hometown. Sepúlveda is also restarting the Luquillo Beach Jazz Festival for Memorial Day weekend. These were all undertaken while he promoted This Is Latin Jazz, which was recorded at New York’s Dizzy’s Club just before the 2020 pandemic shutdown. So Sepúlveda knows all about urgent response.
“I’m just a trumpet player and bandleader, but never handled this aspect of the business,” Sepúlveda said from his car while heading to one more business meeting. “But I have a great crew, and I’m eager. I just want to play.”
The C-Note is a three-floor building overlooking the ocean. Currently, the music room can fit about 50 people, but Sepúlveda is knocking down walls for more performance space and constructing a recording studio as well as a restaurant. His goal is build to a place that’s similar to where he worked when he lived in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the Blue Note. He added that organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center serve as a model for his club’s educational mission.
“I’m planning to start with a trumpet workshop, then saxophones,” said Sepúlveda, an experienced educator who taught at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico for 16 years. “We would get a group of students to see music for free, and that would be for children of the town.”
While Sepúlveda is making room for bigger audiences at the C-Note, his plan for restarting the Luquillo Beach Jazz Festival means organizing on a larger scale. The event started in 2013 and typically brought in about 5,000 people. The hurricane curtailed the festival and COVID struck just as he was hoping to bring it back. None of which is blocking his determination this year as he speaks with potential performers and sponsors.
This Is Latin Jazz brought vital guests to join Sepúlveda’s sextet, The Turnaround. Randy Brecker, Steve Turre and Miguel Zenón appear on a few tracks and lift his robust tone. Throughout, the bandleader reinforces the ties between core Cuban and Puerto Rican idioms — danza, plena, bomba — and jazz. He also adapts a vamp from his cousin Eddie Palmieri’s “La Libertad Logico” for the melody to his “Liberty.”
“What I try to do is combine the two musics without losing elements of hard-bop and not losing the element of Latin music,” Sepúlveda said. “If you play Latin and then change to play hard-bop or bebop it has to swing both ways.”
Sepúlveda knows that now’s the time to carry that message forward.
“Almost everybody’s gone — Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaría,” Sepúlveda said. “We have to maintain this music, that’s the purpose. Even though it’s a little more modern — with modern harmonies — it has the essential roots of the music. And we have to pass it on to other generations.” DB
Jack DeJohnette boasted a musical resume that was as long as it was fearsome.
Oct 28, 2025 10:47 AM
Jack DeJohnette, a bold and resourceful drummer and NEA Jazz Master who forged a unique vocabulary on the kit over his…
“Think of all the creative people I’m going to meet and a whole other way of thinking about music and a challenge of singing completely different material than I would have sung otherwise to my highest level in dedication to the moment,” Elling says about his Broadway run.
Sep 9, 2025 1:18 PM
Kurt Elling was back at home in Chicago, grabbing some family time in a late-June window between gigs. Sporting a smile…
Pat Metheny will perform with his Side-Eye III ensemble at Big Ears 2026 in Knoxville, Tennessee, next March.
Sep 9, 2025 12:19 PM
Big Ears has announced the lineup for its 2026 festival, which will take place March 26–29 and include 250…
“[That’s] the thing of the beboppers,” Bradford said. “These guys were important for not only playing that wonderful music, but they knew a sort of social stance, you see?”
Sep 9, 2025 1:07 PM
It was a calm, balmy, near-perfect evening in Westwood, California, not far from UCLA, in the expansive courtyard at…
Esperanza Spalding closed an audacious Chicago Jazz Festival set with “Endangered Species.”
Sep 9, 2025 11:50 AM
The 45th Chicago Jazz Festival kicked off its headline events with two erudite individuals, Esperanza Spalding and…
