Arturo Sandoval & The Latin Train — North Sea Jazz, 1995

Live Arturo Sandoval & The Latin Train concert at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague in 1995, from the festival’s official archive. An exceptional Cuban trumpeter, heir and protégé of Dizzy Gillespie, Arturo Sandoval here presents the repertoire of his project The Latin Train, which fuses North American jazz with the Afro-Cuban rhythms of his native island. On the great Dutch stage, the full concert highlights staggering virtuosity — incandescent high notes, bebop phrasing, forays on piano and percussion — in the service of compositions where the clave, the mambo and Latin jazz set the tempo. This filmed document captures Sandoval in the mid-1990s, shortly after his exile to the United States, at a time when he was cementing his status as a living legend of the Latin trumpet. For lovers of Afro-Cuban jazz and newcomers to Caribbean live music alike, this North Sea Jazz concert is a dazzling demonstration of the art of one of the greatest trumpeters of his generation, captured at one of the world’s most prestigious festivals.