Sofia Reyes

Sofia Reyes covers the international side of jazz from Miami. Her beat is Latin jazz, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and the festival circuit that carries jazz beyond the US and UK axis most English-language coverage still defaults to. She writes about the Havana Jazz Festival, the rooms in Lisbon and Barcelona, the São Paulo scene, and the cross-pollination happening in Puerto Rico, Colombia, and across the Caribbean. Her interview work focuses on musicians who sit at the boundary: players whose harmonic vocabulary is jazz but whose rhythmic foundation comes from somewhere else, and vice versa. Her reference points are the obvious ones: Chucho Valdés, Arturo O'Farrill, Danilo Pérez, Roberto Fonseca. And the less obvious ones she thinks deserve the same coverage: Harold López-Nussa, Yissy García, Aruán Ortiz, and the younger generation coming out of ENA in Havana. She covers events and venues directly when she can get there, and reports on releases and scene developments remotely when she cannot. Sofia's byline appears on Interviews, Jazz Events, and coverage across every category when the story has a Latin or international dimension. Her job is to make sure eJazzNews reads like jazz is a global music, because it is.