The Red Theater roared with the sound of a standing ovation last Wednesday night as six-time Grammy award winning composer and pianist Arturo O’Farrill and his band, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, teamed up with four artists from around the world to put on one of the most global performances the Arts Center has seen to date.

The event opened with a few words from O’Farrill as he thanked the university for his wonderful experience in the UAE and welcomed British-Bahraini trumpeter and psychedelic Arabic jazz composer, Yazz Ahmed. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour concert, O’Farrill welcomed the three other artists to the stage with him one by one to perform. Each brought their own flavor to the already expansive sound of O'Farrill's seventeen-man band.

“It is the world premier performance for a piece like this,” said Mohannad Al Bakri, the Arts Center’s Director of External Relations and Partnerships. “From here, this piece may travel the world, might be presented in many other countries, and the name of the [NYUAD] Arts Center, and Abu Dhabi and the UAE is linked to it.”

Together, the artists took the audience around the world of music, from oudist Ali Obaid’s emotional and classic Emirati performance to Malika Zarra’s French-Moroccan jazz vocals and Kuwaiti band Boom.Diwan’s plucky percussion.

For the show’s finale, O’Farrill welcomed all four artists back on stage with him for an incredibly intricate three piece composition.

“I like to have my ass kicked.” O’Farrill said. “I like to have myself challenged. I don’t like to coast. When you work with people from different backgrounds and different musical understandings, invariably they are going to write music that is challenging: that you may not even be able to play.”

With his precise yet fiery playing style, the experienced composer kept everything under his control, and even went as far as to get up several times during the performance to walk the stage, dance along and play some percussion.

To O’Farrill, music is a tool for bringing the world closer together; a piece of the landscape he can control and alter in order to make a change.

“Music is the ocean I swim in. It’s not me. It is the language I speak. It’s not me… Music is the conduit” O’Farrill added.

Like O’Farrill’s melodies, the mission of the Arts Center at NYUAD is multi-layered. One goal is to bring together contemporary performing artists from around the world in order to unify the transnational community within the UAE and the university. Another is to develop a new expanse of work from established groups — such as the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra — to our own students and staff while also contributing to the local artistic and cultural scene within the UAE.

“In a place that can be as transparent as NYUAD, the arts become a center of building a connection to the place and to one another, especially with people from so many different backgrounds, who don’t necessarily come here with a lot of shared experiences.” Bill Bragin, Executive Artistic Director of the Arts Center at NYUAD commented.

“We are creating that shared history.”

In addition to the performance and the compositional and rehearsal work, the artists were also welcomed by the university to take part on a UAE cultural experience. After the artists arrived in Abu Dhabi, they were welcomed to a dinner with the organizers and several members of the community.

“That dinner is not about food. It is about knowing each other. It is about introducing each other to each other,” Al Bakri said. “From that point, the artist feels like ‘oh, I am welcome here. I have a place here. I own this relation. It’s not that I’m just coming to present and leave.’”

O’Farrill was taken around Abu Dhabi to landmarks such as the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The artists were also taken to the desert, where they were given the opportunity to learn and ask about Emirati culture and customs. O’Farrill recounted the experience of meeting one Emirati poet describing his open-heartedness.

“I am really blown away by the generosity of the people that I’ve met.” O’Farrill said. “Everyone seems to work on the presupposition that this is a very special place.”

In addition to this, O’Farrill spent time around the university, exploring and visiting classes to talk with students about his work.

The Arts Center at NYUAD hopes to bring influential artists into contact with both faculty and students in a more meaningful way than a one-night performance. For example, the week prior to the performance, O’Farrill spent several hours teaching a piano master class to members of the NYUAD community.

“For a person that got six Grammys, I was expecting of him to be more hard to connect with,” said Kacper Madejek, Class of 2022.

“But [it] turned out that he was so humble and so appreciative of every musical aspect of every participant of the master class. It was just such a pleasure to work with him. I think the advice that he gave me was so simple, and yet so effective, proving that he deserves the success that he got.”

The concert itself was not only a technical and logistical masterpiece, with the musicians only meeting as a group for the first time three days before the performance, but also a unifier of several groups on campus and in the community. As Bragin said, “Tonight is very much about heritage and global diaspora, and new ways to make it present tense, and not just past tense.”

Like other campus events such as Afro Fest and Asia-Pacific Night, this concert was designed to share the culture of a community.

Much of the work of a composer and director like O’Farrill is discovering new ways to successfully communicate his vision to those around him. He regards it as dangerous, yet exciting.

“Danger is a great motivator, and it’s a great energy to have in your music. The feeling that anything could happen, that it could be a monstrous, disastrous flame-out,” O’Farrill said. “But only if you risk this monstrous, disastrous flame-out, will you have this pure explosion of realized possibility.