Arriving in Times Square at rush hour, whether on foot or in an Uber, taxi, or your own congestion-pricing-hit car, you are immediately bombarded by jumbo plasma billboards towering over the street and TV screens within brand-name storefronts projecting pixilated ad messages pulsating with sexualized imagery across the gender spectrum. From multiple angles, options abound — sneakers, underwear, sportswear, watches, designer purses, I ♥ NY T-shirts, tourist trinkets of every variety. Hordes swarm the district’s roughly eight-block radius, cluttering the sidewalks and spilling out into the streets like determined ants crawling over this electronic campo. Horns honk, double-decker tour buses belch exhaust fumes, smoke rises from food carts, steam spews from manhole covers. What is less likely anywhere in sight are instances of meaningful human interaction. Times Square is a place built on commerce and little else; it is not a neighborhood, per se, but rather an outdoor shopping arcade largely devoid of camaraderie, solidarity, or significant human discourse. It’s one big carny show characterized by hustle and bustle in the name of money, the transference of goods as a religion. Mostly, longtime New Yorkers avoid the place. For anyone who has called the city home since before the area’s dramatic transformation, starting in the 1990s, Times Square can bring on feelings of existential dread.
It is what it is; someone profound said that. Times Square has always been a handful, from its Broadway heyday in the 1930s to the grindhouse ’70s, with that decade’s sleaze and street hustle. In both cases, at least it was human. Times Square now is a corporate enterprise — noisy, flashy, but unimaginative and soulless. Which makes it an unlikely place to meet with one of the most soulful jazz artists currently on the scene.
If you’re not yet familiar with the name Darryl Yokley, you should be — and you will be. A 43-year-old tenor saxophonist and composer of extraordinary ability, Yokley has recently released a new CD that represents his highest level of achievement to date. Un Mundo en Soledad is an epic, mind-blowing musical interpretation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s beloved masterpiece. First published in 1967, the book has never been out of print. Recently, Netflix released a lavish, highly praised miniseries based on the novel, which has re-introduced its epic dreamscape of a narrative to a whole new generation.
Yokley plays soprano sax, bass flute, and Aztec death whistle, a ceremonial wind instrument traditionally used to scare off animals.
I meet Yokley at the Stinger, a bar/restaurant inside the Intercontinental Hotel on West 44th Street, across the street from Birdland. It’s near the Shubert Theater, where the saxman is currently employed as part of the orchestra for the Broadway play Hell’s Kitchen, based on the songs of pop star Alicia Keys. In the modern-day version of living as a jazz musician in New York City, the hustle is never-ending. As the father of a young child, Yokley feels lucky to have a regular paycheck. “Like most jazz musicians today,” he tells me, “I have taught classes, which can be theoretical and unsatisfying. At least I’m getting to play music, though playing as part of the orchestra for a big Broadway show can be sort of utilitarian.” On a break between his afternoon rehearsal and that night’s show, we spend a couple of hours discussing the new album.
Originally from Los Angeles, Yokley has a boyish enthusiasm for his work that belies his more serious intentions as an artist. He looks 10 years younger than his 43 years. He has a big butter-eating smile, and an easy laugh. Though he talks with the seriousness of a scholar about Un Mundo en Soledad (“A World in Solitude”), which he conceived of and developed over many years, you get the sense that none of it really works for Yokley unless he is having fun. “Writing and even recording can be a grind,” he says. “If the music isn’t satisfying and bringing joy into your life, that’s a problem.”
I first met Darryl Yokley seven years ago, when he was playing a gig at Smalls Jazz Club, on West 10th Street, in the Village. I was introduced to him by renowned pianist Zaccai Curtis, who is part of Sound Reformation, Yokley’s band. Zaccai and his brother, bassist Luques Curtis, who also plays on the new CD, are part of a generation of accomplished jazz players and composers, all under the age of 45, who are charting a new course for the music in the 21st century.
“All of us,” says Yokley, “Zaccai, Luques, my drummer, Wayne Smith, and many others out there today — what we have in common is a respect for tradition, for everything that came before, but also a desire to do something fresh and original.”
And Un Mundo en Soledad is nothing if not original. Though it is based on a cherished literary source, Yokley was tasked with reconceiving the multigenerational story of the Buendía family, from the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, in purely musical terms. This is not a soundtrack album, with musical interludes used to underscore the dramaturgy of a play or movie; it is something entirely different. “The book is considered one of the great literary works of the 20th century — if not the greatest,” notes Yokley. “Many people know it and love it. They have a fixed idea in their head of what the story is and how it might sound musically. I knew that anything I might do with it had to sound authentic. But it also had to have its own reality, with a melodic through line that held it all together as one cohesive piece.”
It also had to have a soundscape that would do justice to the novel’s dense, colorful panorama of characters and events. Along with the Curtis brothers on piano and bass and Smith on drums, Little Johnny Rivero serves the essential role of percussionist — the strong staccato back beat — that gives the venture a Latin Jazz heart and soul. In addition to tenor sax, Yokley plays soprano sax, bass flute, and Aztec death whistle, a ceremonial wind instrument traditionally used to scare off animals. This is a larger variety of instruments than Darryl has ever played on a record before. There are spoken-word contributions from an assortment of people, including the children of both Yokley and the Curtis brothers. The entire enterprise has a richness of sound that makes it feel at times as if a large orchestra is playing.
Part of all that, says Yokley, is due to the task at hand. “Much of this is simply the fantastical nature of the storytelling style from that book. Apparitions and ghosts come into the story in a very matter-of-fact way, which was one of the things that captivated me when I first read that book in high school. I’ve read it three or four times since then. I knew that any record based on the book would require a rich tapestry of sounds, some of it based in Colombian or Latin American traditions, but also, the music needed to be dream-like, almost meditative, if it hoped to reflect the tone of magic realism that has made the book so popular.”
“If everything for you is comfortable — even outside of art, in life — you’re probably not doing the right thing or being around the right people. You’re not checking out the right stuff.”
Epic musical storytelling has been part of Yokley’s métier in recent years. His previous record, Pictures at an African Exhibition (2018), was a dazzling concept album revolving around the theme of African migration and the slave trade, leading up to and including the Middle Passage. It was an ambitious record that dared to evoke Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Wayne Shorter, and others who combined spirituality with adventurous compositional structures and prodigious technique on the horn.
“I learned a lot from writing that record,” says Yokley. “Mostly, coming up with a thematic melody where, yes, you write individual songs, but every song is part of the larger musical framework. It comes back to the idea of storytelling through music. If I had not confronted those challenges while putting together that record, I never could have done Un Mundo en Soledad.”
∞ ∞ ∞
When One Hundred Years of Solitude was released, Gabriel Garcia Márquez was 40 years old and had published only one previous novel. He’d spent much of his early writing career as a journalist. Though journalism is largely meant to be based on fact, Márquez believed that the factual basis of journalism was a logical launching point for his literary adventures as a writer of fiction. In an interview in the UNESCO Courier, published after his death, in 2014, Márquez was quoted as saying, “I had an extraordinary childhood, surrounded by highly imaginative and superstitious people, people who lived in a misty world populated by phantasms…. In the Caribbean, and in Latin America in general, we consider so-called magical situations part of everyday life, like any other aspect of reality. It seems quite natural to believe in portents, telepathy, premonitions, a whole host of superstitions and fantastical ways of coming to terms with reality. I never try to explain or justify such phenomena. I see myself as a realist, plain and simple.”
Tracing seven generations of Colombian life, starting with the founding of the fictional town of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía, through births, deaths, tragedies, genocide, and all manner of fantastical discoveries, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a feast for the senses. Yokley knew that to approximate the mood of the novel, he had to capture not only the chronological logic of the story as told by Márquez but also the spiritual essence of the storytelling: a mystical, rhapsodic quality that might cause a listener to close their eyes, open their ears, and conjure visual imagery in their imagination. “I read Wayne Shorter’s biography,” notes Yokley, “and he says, ‘Music is movies without words,’ meaning your music needs to have a story that it is telling at all times. I tend to compose music with imagery in mind.”
The album contains 12 tunes, from the effervescent “Macondo” to “El Pueblo,” a vallenato (a Colombian folk music genre that originated in the Caribbean), to “El Duelo,” which is straight-up Latin jazz with an Afro-Cuban rhythm, to “Desaparecieron,” a nightmarish, Charles Mingus–like composition and musical rendering of the real-life 1928 Banana Massacre, a slaughter of striking workers that would bring about the destruction of the fictional Macondo.
Says Yokley, “In the book, even joyous communal moments have a dark side. The wedding, for instance. The guy is marrying his cousin. It’s a wedding in Babylon. So in the composition, ‘Los Matrimonios Malditos,’ yes, it’s happy sounding, it’s a calypso, but underneath the bass there is a note that is off, signifying that something is wrong. It’s in the key of F. Maybe only musicians will get this, but in medieval times that interval was considered the devil’s interval, because of the way it sounded. Musicians used to avoid that thing at all costs, you know? They said it sounded like the devil. So, with this composition I’m saying that this is a cursed marriage, by putting the devil’s modulation in there.”
Then he adds, “In my opinion, really good art shouldn’t always be beautiful. It shouldn’t always be right down the middle, where you can easily digest it in the first sitting. Otherwise, how do you grow? If everything for you is comfortable — even outside of art, in life — you’re probably not doing the right thing or being around the right people. You’re not checking out the right stuff.”
“We’re faced with what every generation of jazz musician has been faced with: trying to make the most of limited resources.”
Someone well-attuned to Yokley’s particular musical vision is Zaccai Curtis, who has been playing with Darryl for a decade, both as part of Sound Reformation and also in his own Zaccai Curtis Band. Says Zaccai, “It’s not easy to have the very distinct kind of voice that Darryl has, especially as a composer. It’s something that every musician strives to have, but not many have achieved it to the extent that he has, with his unique instrumentation and overall vision.”
Zaccai remembers when Yokley explained to him what he was trying to do with Un Mundo en Soledad. They had been workshopping some of the tunes in live performances, and Yokley explained that he was actually writing a suite based on the Márquez book, which Zaccai was not familiar with. So he picked up a copy of the book and was stunned. “Honestly, I didn’t know what he was talking about, it was beyond my comprehension. I thought it might be pretentious. But Darryl knew exactly what he wanted to do. He broke it all down and laid it out for the rest of us. It was an incredible experience for all of us in the band.”
Rigorous dedication to the craft is something Zaccai knows well. His own album from 2024, Cubop Lives!, which features his brother, Luques, on bass, received a Grammy Award in the category of Best Latin Jazz Album for 2025. Yokley’s album will be eligible for a nomination next year.
Both Zaccai’s album and Yokley’s were recorded on Truth Revolution Records (TRR), which is owned and managed by the Curtis brothers’ father, Ted Curtis. “I knew Darryl was destined for big things,” says the elder Curtis, who started his label in 2009, when his sons and Yokley were still in their twenties. “I love Darryl’s writing, and he’s definitely a hard worker.” As with all of the records produced by TRR, which Ted thinks of as a collective, the concept for Un Mundo en Soledad was passed along by Darryl and reviewed by all the Curtis family musicians, as well as other musicians considered to be part of the TRR stable. Ted was less intrigued by the literary pedigree of Darryl’s idea than he was by the music itself. “I love the way that he incorporated the Caribbean and Latin styles. I know he had been thinking in these terms for a while, so it was great to see him take these ideas to their logical conclusion.”
In some ways, the TRR stable represents the future of jazz in the New York area. The Curtis brothers (who are from Hartford, Connecticut), Yokley, Christian Scott, Reinaldo De Jesus, Keyon Harrold, and others play on each other’s albums and help each other develop musical projects. “It’s like a family,” says Ted. “I’ve watched these guys grow up together. I’ve sent them to music camps together. They gather at Luques’s garage to try out new things. Their families are close — wives, girlfriends, kids. They sustain and support each other. They see themselves as brothers.”
Watching these musicians develop and mature into talented artists gives Ted Curtis a personal stake in rooting for their success. He is pulling for Darryl Yokley, who has produced what Ted believes is perhaps a generational creative accomplishment. “You hope that the radio stations and podcasts and reviewers take notice, but you never know. With the business the way it is, you can create something great and it maybe never gets the attention that it deserves.”
∞ ∞ ∞
At the Stinger, Yokley and I discuss the present-day conundrum that is the jazz business. It has been many decades since jazz was a mass-market commodity. The digital revolution wiped out the music business in general: Vinyl is a nostalgia trip for listeners (minimal profit for artists), CDs are a dinosaur, and streaming literally pays pennies on the dollar to the artists. Live performances are essential in terms of staying sharp, but unless you are a marquee name, like Wynton Marsalis or Herbie Hancock, they don’t pay much, either. “We all bitch and moan about it, but what can you do?” says Yokley. “This is the state of the business. It is what it is. We’re faced with what every generation of jazz musician has been faced with — trying to make the most of limited resources.”
It is especially difficult for an artist like Darryl Yokley, who is ambitious and thinks big. He’s already pondering his next musically cosmic project, a melding of jazz and Mexican folk music. (Though he is African American, Yokley also has Mexican blood on his mother’s side.) It has been a longtime ambition of his to bring together jazz and Mexican music in a way that has never been done before.
In the meantime, Yokley is understandably proud of Un Mundo en Soledad. The complex beauty of this record has inspired our conversation, infusing it with passion, the pleasure of discovery, symbiosis, and much camaraderie. It is time for Yokley to hurry off to his “day job,” playing in the orchestra of the big Broadway extravaganza.
We shake hands, say our goodbyes, and head back outside into the amalgamated concrete jungle of Times Square. ❖
T.J. English is the author of Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld, published by William Morrow/HarperCollins.
Darryl Yokley’s Sound Reformation will be performing music from Un Mundo en Soledad at Smalls Jazz Club, 183 West 10th Street, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.
