Sofrito & the Blues

Carmen Cancél and her NYC based band, Sofrito & the Blues, have entertained audiences across the US and at The Voices of Diaspora Festival in NYC. This hot group features a combination of fresh, original arrangements of Latin, jazz, and blues standards. The band is composed of Grammy and Latin Grammy award winning musicians Carmen Cancél on lead vocals, Jainardo Batista on percussion and vocals, César Orozco on piano, Juancho Herrera on guitar, Pedro Giraudo on bass, and Matt Garrison on saxophone and flute.

Sofrito & the Blues is a versatile ensemble and can perform as a full sextet for larger events while also scaling down to a trio or quartet for more intimate settings. Our repertoire includes Latin, jazz, and blues music that can be performed in 45-minute sets for any event or as a 75-minute long cabaret style show (with no intermission).

Band Bios:
Carmen Elisa Cancél
Hailed as a singer possessing a “crystalline timbre and intense acting ability,” (L'Arena, Verona, Italy) Puerto Rican soprano, Carmen Elisa Cancél, uses her classical training to excel in a variety of musical genres including opera, musical theater, cabaret, jazz, and Latin music. Her singing has taken her throughout the US and countries around the world including Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Mexico. She is an active teaching artist and performer in NYC.

Jainardo Batista
Puerto Rican singer and percussionist Jainardo Batista comes from a family with a long tradition in music and theater in Puerto Rico. As a Jazz Ambassador of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he has toured Central and Northwest Africa as well as South America and the Caribbean. Additionally, he has performed in the Jerusalem Jazz Festival with Roman Díaz and Grupo Agolona; at the Essaouira Gnawa Festival (Morocco) with Colette Michaan's Querencia; and with Grammy-nominated Raíces Habaneras at New York's Town Hall. Jainardo maintains an active performance schedule in NYC.

César Orozco
César Orozco is a prolific Cuban/Venezuelan pianist, violinist, composer, arranger, producer, and educator. Mr. Orozco has become an in-demand pianist as a sideman as well as a leader of his own projects. Some of the artists he has worked with include Paquito D’Rivera, Pedrito Martinez, Gary Thomas, Yosvany Terry, Flavio Sala, Luisito Quintero, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Luis Enrique, Itai Kriss, Troy Roberts, Paul Bollenback, Jeremy Warren, and Giovanni Hidalgo just to name a few.

Juancho Herrera
Latin Grammy nominated producer, singer-songwriter and guitarist, Juancho Herrera is part of a wave of extraordinary Latin American musicians who’ve transformed the New York music scene in recent decades. Herrera has been an essential collaborator with some of the era’s definitive artists in jazz and world music, such as Claudia Acuña, Marta Gomez, Lila Downs, Sofia Rei, Mercedes Sosa, The Chieftains, Branford Marsalis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arturo O’Farrill, Alejandro Sanz, and Idan Raichel.

Pedro Giraudo
After two decades performing with the most important interpreters of tango, Pedro Giraudo debuted his own Tango Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing and since then has become one of the most compelling tango artists worldwide. Among the many noteworthy events in Pedro Giraudo’s career, in 2014 Pedro recorded bass on Ruben Blades’ CD “Tangos”, which won a Grammy and a Latin Grammy. His Pedro Giraudo Tango Quartet is a Latin Grammy Award winning quartet that represents the evolution of tango.

Matt Garrison
Saxophonist and composer Matt Garrison has been on the NYC jazz scene since 1997. He has shared the stage with jazz luminaries such as Adam Nussbaum, Andy Laverne, Todd Coolman, Ray Vega, Jon Cowherd, Eliot Zigmund, and Dennis Irwin. Garrison's debut album "Familiar Places" garnered critical acclaim and peaked at #13 on the CMJ Jazz Radio Chart, followed by "Blood Songs", “Patchwork.”