Arturo Sandoval has lived several musical lives: Cuban-born trumpet virtuoso, Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer, Dizzy Gillespie protégé, composer, bandleader, and one of the most decorated musicians of his generation. He is a multiple Grammy winner, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and a Kennedy Center Honoree. And still, after all of that, he remains a restless student of sound.

His new album, Sangú, is his 49th, a number that happens to match the year of his birth, 1949. It began during the pandemic with hundreds of iPhone recordings: fragments, grooves, chord changes, and ideas captured at home. His son Arturo “Tury” Sandoval III and his daughter-in-law and manager Melody Lisman helped shape those sketches into one of the most personal records of his career. Even the title came by accident. You’ll soon find out how a slip of language became a statement of purpose.

The album is rooted in Afro-Cuban rhythm, but it is not nostalgic. It is Sandoval still moving forward, still practicing every day, still chasing freedom through discipline. In our conversation, he talks about forbidden jazz in Cuba, the Voice of America on the radio, Dizzy, Clint Eastwood, vinyl, yes even Rachmaninoff.

This is a conversation about Sangú, but also about never stopping the creative process. About carrying Cuba inside you. About finding freedom in music, and then earning that freedom again every day. At 77, Arturo Sandoval does not sound like an artist looking back. He sounds like one who is still beginning.

Today, we return to one of the most discussed albums in pop history: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

Nearly 60 years after Brian Wilson assembled its world of harmonies, longing, bass lines, sound effects, and impossible emotional detail, Interscope-Capitol’s Definitive Sound Series is preparing a new mono One Step edition sourced from analog tapes connected to the revered 1972 Brother/Reprise pressing. For collectors and audiophile listeners, that pressing has long held a special place because of its clarity, balance, and unusually vivid presentation of the album’s dense production.

My guest is reissue producer Tom “Grover” Biery, who helped trace, verify, and bring these tapes back into the conversation with the help of Chris Bellman and the archive teams. We talk about why this source matters, what “three-dimensional mono” means, how a single-channel recording can still feel layered and spacious, and why the 1972 pressing may reveal something important about how Pet Sounds came to be understood after its original 1966 release.

We also get into the practical side of making a record like this: tape boxes, archive clues, test pressings, quality control at RTI, the cost of producing a limited One Step edition, and the challenge of honoring a masterpiece without flattening it into mythology.

Here is my conversation with Tom “Grover” Biery on Pet Sounds, the 1972 Brother/Reprise source, and the continuing search for the clearest way to hear one of Brian Wilson’s greatest achievements.

What does it mean for a musician to be free?

Not free as a slogan, or a genre label, but truly free: free to search, free to return, free to follow a sound across a lifetime.

Alan Braufman has been asking that question, in one form or another, for decades. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Braufman became part of the New York free music community in the 1970s, connected to the downtown loft jazz scene, where music was not only performed, but lived. In 1975, he released Valley of Search, a debut whose title seemed to name something larger than a record: the artist as seeker, moving toward a sound, a feeling, a kind of musical truth.

Now, with Anthem for Peace, Braufman returns with a new studio album produced by his nephew Nabil Ayers and recorded in a single day with Patricia Brennan, Chad Taylor, and Luke Stewart. The music is direct but open, melodic but untamed, rooted in free jazz while still reaching for song, spirit, and forward motion.

His work has often been called optimistic free jazz, and maybe that phrase gets close to the center of it. Freedom can be beautiful, but it is not always easy. Searching can last a lifetime. So today, we ask Alan Braufman what he has been searching for, what he has found, and whether Anthem for Peace brings him closer to the freedom his music has been reaching toward all along.