At age 20, Charlie Sepulveda earned the first trumpet slot in the band of another native New Yorker of Puerto Rican ancestry, heralded pianist Eddie Palmieri. Twenty-five years later, after working with stars from Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente, Sepulveda has further proof that his studies at City College of New York, and in Puerto Rico, were fruitful. He started a solo recording career in 1991, but has only seven CDs, partly because he’s been busy giving back as a professor at the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico.
The latest, Charlie Sepulveda & the Turnaround, is an audio textbook in combining disparate studio crispness with concert energy. Sepulveda also studied at the conservatory, and at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. The university’s campus radio station, WRTU, has state-of-the-art digital equipment, so the trumpeter recorded the seven-piece band live in the studio.
