A night out with Cuban jazz maestro, Arturo Sandoval

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On a Thursday in early June, under the hot bright lights of the famous Blue Note jazz club in Hollywood, the legendary trumpeter and composer Arturo Sandoval took center stage with a microphone in hand — and a hip wiggle for good measure.Rocking a silk shirt adorned with rhinestones, and backed by his incredibly nimble band, the Cuban-born virtuoso kicked off his four-night residency at the club with sizzling banter and panache.“I had to watch what I said in Cuba,” he told the audience.

“Now I live in the United States of America, man — I say whatever the hell I want.Do you like it? Well, if you don’t, I don’t care!”Now 77, Sandoval feels he was liberated by the power of jazz.

Released in May, his dynamic new album, “Sangú” — Spanglish for “sounds good!” — is bursting with the free-spirited energy he’s cultivated in the decades since he came to the United States from Cuba.Sandoval maintains a fiery pace throughout the album, commanding not only the trumpet, but the timbales and piano.

(He even recorded his own scat singing for the appropriately-titled track, “Scat.”)Once derided by the revolutionary government as “Yankee imperialism,” jazz music became a staple of Sandoval’s daily diet.As a young trumpet player in Cuba’s national band, he sought refuge in the sounds of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie by tuning into Voice of America: a radio program covertly broadcast from the States.

Sandoval eventually served three-and-a-half months in jail in the 1970s when he was caught listening to the program — but with famed pianist and director Chucho Valdés, Sandoval would pioneer a distinctly Afro-Cuban jazz fusion with the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, which was renamed Irakere and won a Grammy for best Latin recording in 1980.It was in 1990, while touring Europe with his hero Gillespie, that Sandoval finally defected from Cuba wi...