Paying Tribute to a Jazz Legend, in Spanish This Time

A result is “David Murray Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole en Español,” a new CD in which Mr. Murray, 56, has assembled a group of young Cuban musicians to play his reworked versions of old chestnuts like “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” and “Cachito.” On Thursday Mr. Murray and a nine-piece band will perform selections from the album at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.

In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Mr. Murray, who is black, said his reasons for undertaking the project were a mixture of the personal and the musical. Seeing a picture of Nat King Cole on the wall of Egrem Studios while in Havana several years ago, and talking about him with the Cuban singers Omara Portuondo and Isaac Delgado, jogged his memories of seeing Cole on television as a child.

“My parents were very religious people who didn’t particularly like anything that was jazz,” he said. “But they liked Nat King Cole because he was a positive image for black people, and that was what they wanted us to see. And to me he looked very cool and debonair in that tuxedo, with that trio of his. He was not only one of the first African-American guys on TV, he was also one of the first serious crossover artists with talent.”

On the more personal side, Mr. Murray, who was born and reared in Oakland, Calif., but now divides his time between France and Portugal, said he also wanted to help his wife, Valerie Malot, and children explore their own heritage and pay them homage. Ms. Malot, who is also Mr. Murray’s manager and co-producer, is of mixed French and Spanish-Cuban descent, and the CD is dedicated to her mother, Maria Olga Duque Torres.

“We’ve done a lot of things where I go to try and find my roots in Africa,” Mr. Murray said, referring to albums like “Fo Deuk Revue” (1997) and “Gwotet” (2004), recorded with Senegalese ensembles. “But we have two kids together, and maybe she’s looking for her roots a little too. So that was her reason, and it became part of mine.”

The saxophonist and clarinetist Hamiet Bluiett, like Mr. Murray a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and with credentials in the jazz avant-garde, said he was not surprised to see his colleague take this direction. He accompanied Mr. Murray on a trip to Cuba a decade ago, where he said both men were inspired by the musical culture.

“Any musician who lives in New York for any length of time already has a Cuban or Latin influence on how he thinks or feels, but the level of musicianship once you get there is so high, the bands are so killing, that it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Bluiett said of the trip to Cuba. “David is someone who is prolific, always very, very busy, who would do five recording sessions a day if he could. So naturally we both got turned on to the process there and said to each other, ‘Wow, this is great.’ From then on it just grew and grew.”

On an early trip to Cuba Mr. Murray met the alto-saxophonist Román Filiu O’Reilly, now 39, who quickly concluded that “we were both drinking from the same well.” So when Mr. Murray decided to tackle the Nat King Cole project, Mr. Filiu, in addition to being offered the alto chair, was asked to assemble a group of young players who could keep up with Mr. Murray’s demanding arrangements.

“David’s way of playing is loose and free and always surprising, but he doesn’t lose the essence of Cuban music, and even if it may seem dissonant at times, it has its beauty,” Mr. Filiu said in a telephone interview. “His arrangement of a bolero or a cha-cha-cha can be daring and fresh, but the voicing of the instruments, the lines he writes for us to play, however challenging they may be, are perfectly in the tradition.”

The Cuban ensemble has toured with Mr. Murray throughout Europe and in Latin America, both before and after recording the “Nat King Cole en Español” CD in Buenos Aires last year, with strings overdubbed in Portugal. But with some restrictions on the ability of Cuban musicians to travel still in place in the United States and Cuba, Mr. Murray will be performing at the Skirball Center with a New York-based group that includes several Cuban musicians.

The two Cole albums on which the project is based were recorded in Havana and then, after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Los Angeles and Mexico City, drawing on a repertory that is largely Cuban and Mexican. Listening to the records, Mr. Murray, called “the most formidable tenor soloist of his generation” by the comprehensive Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, was struck by how dated the original arrangements seemed.

“A lot of it sounded like the soundtrack for a bad B-movie, very Hollywood, so the first thing I had to figure out was what not to do,” he said. “The strings are too syrupy, the trumpets are too loud and the clave is not even there. So I had to go and reharmonize a lot of the songs and bring them into our century before I even did the arrangements.”

Mr. Murray, who early in his career played in R&B; bands around San Francisco, also has a pop side that surfaces occasionally. In the early 1990s he sometimes played with the Grateful Dead, which led to his making a CD called “Dark Star” after Jerry Garcia’s death, and most recently he has been working with the neo-soul singer Macy Gray, whom he met this summer while both were involved in an Afro-pop project organized by Ahmir Thompson, known as Questlove, drummer for the Roots.

“He’s just a very accomplished musician who knows everything there is to know about orchestrating, plus he’s one of those people who seems to live and breathe music,” Ms. Gray said of Mr. Murray. “On the Afro-pop project I loved his arrangements: a specific blend of horns that he put together with a sound that I’d never heard before. So I wanted that on my new album,” devoted to covers of rock and hip-hop songs, “and whenever I do horns now, I’m going to send them his way.”