Adam O'Farrill
Biography Adam O'Farrill
Adam O'Farrill
is a trumpet player and composer from Brooklyn, NY. As a trumpeter, he has performed and/or recorded with artists such as Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mary Halvorson, Arturo O'Farrill, Mulatu Astatke, Brasstracks, Stephan Crump, Onyx Collective, Anna Webber, and Samora Pinderhughes. As a composer and bandleader, he has led the quartet, Stranger Days, comprised of Xavier Del Castillo, Walter Stinson, and Zack O'Farrill. Their eponymous debut (2016, Sunnyside Records) was inspired by film and literature, while the follow-up album, El Maquech (2018, Biophilia Records) covered everything from Mexican folk music to Irving Berlin, as well as O'Farrill's original compositions. Both were critically acclaimed, with the New York Times writing of the first release, “Marshaling a sharp band of his peers, Mr. O’Farrill establishes both a firm identity and a willful urge to stretch and adapt.”. The latter album was listed as one of the best jazz albums of 2018 by the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, The Boston Globe, and Nextbop. In 2018 and 2019, Adam performed with his electro-acoustic nonet, Bird Blown Out of Latitude, performing at National Sawdust, The Jazz Gallery, and Threes Brewing.
O'Farrill comes from a rich musical background, with his grandfather being the Afro-Cuban-Irish composer and arranger Chico O'Farrill, his father being the cultural boundary-pushing composer and pianist Arturo O'Farrill, his mother Alison Deane being a classical pianist and educator, and his brother Zack O'Farrill being a drummer, composer, and educator. Adam is of Mexican, Cuban, and Irish heritage on his dad's side, and Eastern European Jewish and African-American on his mom's side. This, combined with growing up in a place of immense cultural diversity, has shaped his tendency to break stylistic borders within not only his original music, but also in terms of who he works with a sideman. O'Farrill was subject of an article in Jazztimes entitled, “Adam O'Farrill Does Not Play Latin Jazz”, where he spoke about the unfair treatment and pigeonholing of Latinx musicians.
Adam made his professional recording debut on Chad Lefkowitz-Brown's debut album, Imagery Manifesto, in 2013. In 2015, he appeared on two critically acclaimed records; Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls and Arturo O'Farrill's Cuba: The Conversation Continues. Adam toured internationally with Mahanthappa's band from 2014 to 2017, performing at the Newport Jazz Festival, Chicago Symphony Hall, North Sea Jazz Festival, Cape Town International Jazz Festival, and more. In 2019, O’Farrill joined guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson’s band, Code Girl, and was featured on her critically acclaimed 2020 album, Artlessly Falling. Other albums he has been featured on include Rhombal (Stephan Crump), Goofballs (Stimmerman), LOI (Raf Vertessen Quartet), Lower East Suite Part One (Onyx Collective), and The Shape of Things to Come (Tarun Balani), and O’Farrill will featured on upcoming albums from artists including Anna Webber, Arturo O’Farrill, Ross McHenry, Almog Sharvit, and Thomas Champagne.
In 2019, Adam won the Downbeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star Trumpet category. Competing in the 2014 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Trumpet Competition, O’Farrill won 3rd place honors. He has also received composition commissions from The Jazz Gallery, YoungArts, and in 2013, won the ASCAP Herb Albert Young Jazz Composer Award.
Adam studied at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, and obtained his Bachelor of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He has studied trumpet with Jim Seeley, Nathan Warner, Ambrose Akinmusire, Laurie Frink, and Thomas Smith, and composition with Reiko Fueting and Curtis Macdonald.
After garnering high acclaim for his previous outings Stranger Days (2016) and El Maquech (2018) — plus sideman credits with trailblazing artists Mary Halvorson, Anna Webber, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kevin Sun and more — Adam O’Farrill (#1 Rising Star trumpeter, 2021 Downbeat Critics Poll) is proud to release the third album from his quartet Stranger Days, Visions of Your Other. The group’s musical language continues to evolve with a new member as of 2019: tenor saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, filling the formidable shoes of tenorist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown as he joins bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Zack O’Farrill in the fold. “Xavier is deeply inquisitive, as an artist and a person,” O’Farrill says. “Walter, Zack, and I had built a strong foundation on principles of rawness and spontaneity, and Xavier brings a slightly more analytical approach, revealing to me layers of the music I didn’t even know were there.”
Visions of Your Other highlights the band’s creative growth with a set of four O’Farrill compositions (“Blackening Skies,” “Inner War,” “Ducks,” the D.H. Lawrence-inspired “Hopeful Heart”), an abstractly funky reading of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “stakra,” and a piece by Stinson (“Kurosawa at Berghain”) that “merges the propulsive rigidity of house music with the amorphous sound of the chord-less quartet,” O’Farrill notes. The album title stems from a line of dialogue in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master (starring Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman) that O’Farrill found seductive: “The visualization of potential scenarios — past, present and future — is a very powerful current in all of us. It can motivate us just as easily as it can delude us. This theme of juxtaposition has been at the core of my work thus far, and this album is no exception.”
On the opening “stakra,” from Sakamoto’s evocative 2017 album async, O’Farrill builds texture and mood with a 20-second electronic sample of the quartet’s performance fed through Paulstretch, a sound design software application used by Sakamoto and other composers. “It’s no exaggeration to say that Sakamoto’s async album changed my life,” declares O’Farrill. “It made me rethink all of the elements of music and the way they’re prioritized. I realized that melody can involve many possibilities, and that texture is not just that — it can actually be the musical protagonist. It’s fair to say it will take a long time to fully process the impact that async has had on me.”
“Blackening Skies,” accompanied by an animated film short from German artist Elenor Kopka, is “both apocalyptic and humorous,” says O’Farrill, who composed the song after a brutal New York heat wave and an experience of summer monsoons in Los Angeles. “I told Elenor all this and she showed me the work of Hieronymus Bosch, using that as a reference point for the tone of the piece.” The staggered staccato rhythms in the horns as they play slightly out of sync is “a concept that Xavier and I have explored in previous projects, such as my large ensemble piece ‘Bird Blown Out of Latitude.’ It’s inspired by electronic music, trying to humanize something very mechanical. There’s a perfection to a lot of electronic music that allows for its ideas to be flexibly interpreted by live instruments, which opens up an exciting and endless world of sound.”
The son of GRAMMY-winning pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill and grandson of legendary Cuban bandleader Chico O’Farrill, Adam O’Farrill has received composer commissions and grants from The Jazz Gallery, The Shifting Foundation, Metropolis Ensemble and ASCAP. He co-led the O’Farrill Brothers Band with his older brother Zack on the albums Giant Peach and Sensing Flight. He continued his rise with Rudresh Mahanthappa on Bird Calls, as well as appearances on Mary Halvorson & Code Girl’s Artlessly Falling, Anna Webber’s Idiom, Arturo O’Farrill’s …dreaming in lions…, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown’s Imagery Manifesto, Stephan Crump’s Rhombal and more. He can also be heard on recent releases by Glenn Zaleski (The Question), Tarun Balani (The Shape of Things to Come), Gabriel Chakarji (New Beginning), Onyx Collective (Lower East Suite Part One) and Aaron Burnett & The Big Machine (Jupiter Conjunct), among others.
