The HBO film For Love or Country stars Andy Garcia as a Cuban musician pulling off a daring Cold War defection, and the dramatic score was written by the film’s own subject, Arturo Sandoval. This episode follows Sandoval from a village called Artemisa in the province of Havana, where he was born into poverty in 1949 and started on percussion in the local band at 13, through three years of rigorous classical training at the Cuban National School of Arts, to the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna and the band Irakere.

The conversation explains how Cuban musicians absorbed Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie through shortwave radio and smuggled records, how Sandoval wove bebop harmony over the strict Afro-Cuban clave, and how meeting Gillespie in 1977 led to a 1989 tour with the United Nations Orchestra and a walk into the American Embassy in Athens. It then covers his 1990 naturalization, four Grammy Awards, the 1995 Super Bowl halftime show, an Emmy for the biopic score, a ballet commission for the Kennedy Center choreographed by Debbie Allen, a trumpet concerto recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, and his teaching at Florida International University and Whitworth University.

• Why learning street slang and conservatory grammar made him fluent in both improvisation and classical precision
• How he played as guest artist with the BBC Symphony and Leningrad Symphony while voted Cuba’s best instrumentalist
• What defecting under state surveillance in a foreign city actually required
• The emotional weight of scoring the most traumatic moments of his own life for the screen
• Why his choice to step into the classroom may be his most enduring legacy