UNA NOCHE CON RUBÉN BLADES from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Rubén Blades Receives GRAMMY® nomination for “Best Latin Jazz Album

Blue Engine Records proudly announces Una Noche con Rubén Blades from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Rubén Blades has been nominated for “Best Latin Jazz Album” for the 62nd annual GRAMMY® Awards, as announced by the Recording Academy® this morning. This is the first album GRAMMY® nomination for Blue Engine Records.

The 62nd annual GRAMMY® Awards will take place on January 26, 2020, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, CA.

Rubén Blades — the salsa giant and nine-time GRAMMY® Award-winning singer, songwriter, actor, and activist — collaborated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in 2014 for an extraordinary series of performances on the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage. On these very special style-straddling, Americas-spanning nights, the worlds of salsa and swing collided.

Music-directed by Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra bassist Carlos Henriquez (called an “emerging master in the Latin jazz idiom” by DownBeat magazine), Una Noche con Rubén Blades features Blades backed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. The group, performs Blades’s own beloved compositions including “Pedro Navaja,” “Patria,” and “El Cantante,” as well as swing-era standards like “Too Close for Comfort” and “Begin the Beguine.” 

“I’ve known Rubén Blades since I was two years old—or at least I feel like I have,” Henriquez says. “His albums—and the sound and the warmth they generated–filled my family’s apartment at 146th and Brook Avenue in the Bronx, and his music was one of my earliest influences.”

“Jazz is the story of taking old parts and building something new,” he continues. “When Rubén joined us for our performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, we did exactly that using the Great American Songbook and the Afro-Cuban rhythms that propel all the wonderful music that Rubén sang that evening. The music I arranged for Rubén Blades to perform with the Orchestra sounds like Panama, New Orleans, and New York all mixed into one. Those sounds form the heart of all our stories as musicians, and in combining them we reaffirmed that we’re all in this together.”

The album was released on October 19, 2018 and received critical praise from outlets including Rolling Stone, NPR Music, and New York Times, which called the original concert “radically beautiful.” Billboard Magazine sums up the release best stating, “Ruben Blades surrounds himself with a robust music ensemble: [the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis] who put a new spin on his classics.”