DENNIS HERNANDEZ TRIO

A student of Havana’s National School of the Arts his particular style of Afro-Cuban phrasing on the trumpet has landed Hernandez in the brass section of some of the top names in jazz and Latin music including: Deborah Carter, Claudio Roditi, Arturo O’Farrill, Horacio ”El Negro ”Hernández, Pedrito Martinez, Alfredo de la Fe, Pat Metheny, Bobby Shew, Frank Foster, Grupo Niche, Guayacán, Nino Segarra, Maelo Ruiz, Tito Nieves, Rey Ruiz, Jerry Gonzalez, and  Omara Portuondo all since 1996 when Dennis moved to Spain. 

His innovative playing has rung out from various jazz festivals in Barcelona from 1998 to ’99 as well as part of the orchestra in staged theater productions. He is a stable member of the Big Band Jazz Terrassa, Barcelona Jazz Orquestra and the Barcelona Big Latin Band.  Hernandez also instructs students as a member of the Jazz and Flamenco Music Workshop of Barcelona.  In 2004 Hernandez becomes a founding member of the group Radio Malanga born in Barcelona of mixed musical fusions.

Hernandez was born October 10, 1972, raised in a spiritual Cuban household in Havana where his mother Zenaida Hernandez was a popular healer and practitioner of the African religion known as Regla de Ocha. Every week there were sacred and secular ceremonies of music and dance where he heard drums and violins playing for Ochun, trumpets for Chango, and piano for Yemaya. Hernandez began studying sight singing and trumpet privately before developing his musical skills throughout the various conservatories that enhanced his early education.

Hernandez can be heard over various recordings he’s done both in Spain and here in New York including:

• the Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite Nº 1. -Eladio Reinón & Bebo Valdés
•Music for Big Band-Jerry González,
•DVD, Latin Percussion NYC, 2008.

• Enyenison Enkama, Pedrito Martinez

• Ecos del Barrio, La Excelencia