Search - Arturo Sandoval :: Dream Come True

A description of Arturo Sandoval's album Dream Come True--a collaboration between the overly flashy Cuban trumpeter and the middle-brow concertmaster Michel Legrand--may sound unpromising, but it's a surprising success, Sandoval's first U.S. recording where his feeling equals his surpassing technique. Perhaps he feels he no longer has to prove himself in his adopted homeland, for the Cuban expatriate plays with a subtlety and tenderness unheard in his previous two U.S. outings. Sandoval and Legrand play a wonderfully restrained, unaccompanied trumpet/piano duet on Gillespie's "Con Alma." Sandoval shows his fiery side when he plays his own "Blue 93" with a Latin-jazz septet. Pushed firmly through bop changes by drummer Peter Erskine and bassist Brian Bromberg, Sandoval engages saxophonist Ernie Watts in give-and-take dialogues on John Coltrane's "Dahomey Dance" and Freddie Hubbard's "Little Sunflower." Three numbers were recorded with a jazz big band and three more with a string orchestra, and yet Legrand's arrangements never obtrude but merely provide a rich harmonic backdrop for Sandoval's solos. --Geoffrey Himes