“I’m a happy man,” reports Luis Muñoz, the celebrated Costa Rican–born Santa Barbara jazz artist and producer, who continues to win accolades worldwide for his optimistic, soothing, and sultry works. It’s a deep happiness, the kind that comes from a gratitude for the fabric of life itself. At age 5, the young Muñoz had to undergo heart surgery. “It was a blessing in disguise. It makes you present at all times, to try to get as much out of life as possible,” he said.
Certainly, he’s seizing every day, with an output that only seems to grow more prolific as the years go by. This year, he won two ACAM (Association of Composers & Musical Authors) awards for his new album, Voz — including Jazz CD of the Year in his native country — and his music was even chosen by NPR’s Alt.Latino program as a “Music for Healing” selection in a post-Trump world. Featuring an international roster of musicians, including Magos Herrera, Téka Penteriche, and Claudia Acuña — renowned jazz singers from Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, respectively — Voz also features incredibly skilled locals such as bassist Randy Tico and pianist George Friedenthal, plus mixing and engineering from S.B. sound engineers Emmet Sargeant and Dominic Camardella.
For lyrics, Muñoz turned to two childhood friends: poets Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy and Osvaldo Sauma, the winner of the National Poetry Award in Costa Rica in 2014, whose words are sung along with those of Rómulo Castro and Jaime Gamboa. “It is wonderful because with them you have such a deep sense of history and friendship. I grew up in a place where everybody knew each other, and then to see them flourish and to be able to collaborate with them — it is a very nice thing.” Something of a collaborator-come-lately, Muñoz, like many artists, began his early years in incubatory solitude to develop his own musical voice, and the studio is very much still a refuge and a place of shelter for him.