Chicago Jazz Hero
A longtime advocate for Latino music in general, and Afro-Latin Jazz in particular, Carlos Flores has played an indispensable behind-the-scenes role in modern Chicago’s cultural development.
He is best known in jazz circles as a co-founder, and the current artistic director, of the city’s Latin Jazz Festival; when the Jazz Institute of Chicago (JIC) created this event in 2007, the organization turned to Carlos for help in programming and logistics. That was a natural choice, since the Latin Jazz Festival was spun off from the JIC’s “Sonidos Calientes” concerts that Carlos had helped program since they began in 1998. Carlos proved instrumental in expanding the scope and scale of the Latin Jazz Festival include such names as Bobby Sanabria, Charlie Sepulveda, and Chuchito Valdes.
Those years saw Flores leave his mark on a number of arts-related initiatives. He was among the co-founders of the city’s Puerto Rican Arts Alliance in 1997. The following year, he established and coordinated the National Puerto Rican Cuatro Festival, followed by the Chicago Afro-Latino Institute and, in 2006, the Puerto Rican Tiple Construction Workshop.
Born in Guayama, Puerto Rico, Carlos earned his master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Illinois Chicago. He later worked in the federal Office for Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, channeling a lifelong commitment to social activism that had begun decades earlier: in the late 1960s, Carlos was a member of the city’s Young Lords, the former street gang that had been refashioned into a community service organization inspired by the Black Panthers.
A widely respected photographer, Carlos has chronicled Latino life in Chicago and beyond, with his work featured in books, scholarly articles, and films around the country. He is currently preparing a photography book that documents the last four decades of everyday life in his Wicker Park neighborhood. He remains an invaluable resource on Chicago’s Latino culture, in print and in person. In fact, his experiences, while specific to his talents, are also emblematic of Latino culture growth in Chicago during his lifetime. Case in point: in the play La Havana Madrid (set in a legendary Chicago nightspot of the 1960s) – a revival of which will be staged this summer by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA – the character “Carlos 1966” is based on Jazz Hero Carlos Flores.
By Neil Tesser
