Every other fall for nearly three decades, the Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU becomes a crossroads of Latin music. This year, the 14th Biennial Latin Music Festival brought together Cuban jazz, Venezuelan brass, and Argentine composition in a four-day celebration of some of the world\u2019s most acclaimed musicians. Each festival is different, offering a fresh mix of Latin\u00a0genres, composers, and performers for Fort Worth audiences to experience. And this year’s lineup was no exception.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Paquito D\u2019Rivera \u2014 the Cuban-born clarinetist and saxophonist with sixteen Grammys \u2014 has been pushing boundaries in jazz and classical music for decades. Trumpeter Pacho Flores, a force of nature from Venezuela, is known for tones that soar and shimmer. At the same time, Argentinian pianist, arranger, and composer Daniel Freiberg moves as easily between a New York jazz club and a concert hall in Buenos Aires. At the center of it all is Dr. Germ\u00e1n Guti\u00e9rrez, director of orchestras at TCU and the festival\u2019s founder, who has made it his mission since 1997 to showcase Latin music in North Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After these legendary musicians spoke to a large classroom of students at TCU\u2019s Van Cliburn Music Hall, we sat down and talked about the event in Dr. Guti\u00e9rrez\u2019s office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a large Latino population here,\u201d Guti\u00e9rrez said. \u201cWhen I came to this in 1996, I said, \u2018We need to give them Latin music\u2026\u2019 We not only play music with national elements, but we bring composers. There was one year that we brought like 25 composers from Latin America, from Puerto Rico, from Cuba, everywhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year’s\u00a0festival unfolded very much as it did for the last 14 years, with Latin music taking center stage.\u00a0Monday, Sept. 29, opened with a faculty recital, followed by a brass ensemble on Tuesday, Sept. 30. Wednesday, Oct. 1, was full of activity, beginning with a midday Q&A with students in the band room, moderated by Tim Walkins, and culminating in a jazz ensemble concert that evening. The festival reached\u00a0its crescendo on Thursday, Oct. 2, when the TCU Symphony Orchestra took\u00a0the stage with its guest artists in a program designed to close out the 2025 edition in grand style.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But it was the Q&A session that revealed why these legends were in attendance. Yes, they were here for the music, but they also came to give back. To mentor and help guide. \u00a0<\/p>\n
For Flores, mentoring feels like a full-circle moment. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was fifteen, I was already teaching a student, the kid was eight\u2026 That\u2019s how it goes \u2014 someone gives to you, and then you pass it on.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
Freiberg added, \u201cThe questions these students ask make you stop and think. You learn more giving than what you receive from others.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
D\u2019Rivera, never one to miss a joke, likened it to paying musical taxes. \u201cYou have to give back something\u2026 it\u2019s like taxes. You want to pay some taxes,\u201d he said. \u201cYou feel better when you see that you were helpful to somebody.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Guti\u00e9rrez, those exchanges are the true heart of the festival. Yes, it\u2019s about world-class concerts in one of the finest halls in Texas. But it\u2019s also about the spark in a student\u2019s eyes when they realize they\u2019re sitting across from a living legend \u2014 someone who once stood exactly where they are now, horn or score in hand, wondering if they belonged.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That spark has kept the Latin Music Festival alive for over a decade, with more to come. In a city that knows a thing or two about big stages \u2014 this is Van Cliburn country, after all \u2014 the festival proves there\u2019s room for other kinds of virtuosity too. The type that blends tradition and improvisation, that speaks Spanish, Portuguese, English, and jazz all at once, and that insists music is meant to be shared.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As D\u2019Rivera put it, reflecting on the connection between teacher and student: \u201cYou have to know where you\u2019re coming from to make the point\u2026 start to look back at what happened before you, to know where you\u2019re going. Otherwise, you might end up in the same place without even knowing it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every other fall for nearly three decades, the Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU becomes a crossroads of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":274759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,2677,12043,185,4084,7371,7372,11878,975,13813,10763,6214,5921,10077,358,7453,142213,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-274758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-artists","10":"tag-arts-and-culture","11":"tag-celebrities","12":"tag-festival","13":"tag-fort-worth","14":"tag-fortworth","15":"tag-live-music","16":"tag-music","17":"tag-people-of-influence","18":"tag-stephen-montoya","19":"tag-students","20":"tag-style","21":"tag-tcu","22":"tag-texas","23":"tag-top-story","24":"tag-traditions","25":"tag-tx","26":"tag-united-states","27":"tag-united-states-of-america","28":"tag-unitedstates","29":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","30":"tag-us","31":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115310710318586443","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}