The outstanding American musician Bill Banfield will be visiting Cuba this week. He will spend several intense days of work and exchange with artists from the largest archipelago of the Antilles. He will also give a concert in the Gisela Hernández Hall of the National Music Museum.

On Saturday 9 December at 10am, he will perform with his accompanying musicians, Wayman Chin, piano; Krystal Banfield, piano; Dwight Andrews, saxophone; Ron Reid, bass, reports Tania Veliz Rodríguez, a specialist at the National Centre for Concert Music.

Double bassist David Faya and his group Camino de Santiago will also be present.

Writer, storyteller and broadcaster Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, will introduce this group of artists.

Born in Detroit, Bill Banfield received his Bachelor’s Degree in Music from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies from Boston University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Michigan.

He is a multi-award-winning composer whose symphonies, operas and chamber works have been commissioned, performed and recorded by orchestras including the National, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Dallas, Akron, Detroit, New York Virtuoso, Grand Rapids, Akron, Richmond, Toledo, Savannah, Indianapolis, Sphinx, Sacramento and San Diego symphonies, the Chicago Symphony and Cuba’s Camerata de La Habana.

Dr Banfield has been a three-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize in American Music (2010, 2016, 2020). His work as a composer and jazz artist has appeared on the Atlantic, TelArc, Collins Classics (London), Centaur, Albany/Visionary and Innova labels.

An accomplished music educator, Banfield has taught in the graduate program at Berklee College of Music, the University of St. Thomas, Indiana University and the University of Minnesota. In 2002, he was a W.E.B. Dubois Fellow at Harvard University. Toni Morrison appointed him Visiting Workshop Professor at Princeton University in 2003. In 2023 he received the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding humanitarian contributions.

He is the author of six books of music, art and cultural criticism, history and biography, and is the founder and director of Jazz Urbane, a contemporary jazz art label dedicated to producing new creative artists.

Dr Cornel West has called him «one of the last great Renaissance men of our time… a towering artist, an exemplary educator, a rigorous scholar, a courageous freedom fighter, and a spiritual genius.»

Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez