“I decided to leave my country for perhaps the two most important reasons in my life, love and music,” states Luis Muñoz, the revered Costa Rican jazz musician, who will be performing two shows as a part of his Spring 2023 Tour at the Soho Restaurant and Music Club on May 4 and at The Underground Exchange in Ojai on May 6.
Muñoz continues, “I had met an American girl who had been my girlfriend for a few years but was coming back to the United States. I left it all behind, family, friends, culture, and that infinite and beautiful green world which is Costa Rica, for that girl and for jazz. Eventually we got married and I'm still together with her; Holly is her name. I also had the opportunity to study jazz firsthand — that trip is something I will never regret!”
From starting his career in music as a self-proclaimed “boy-band teenage star playing rock” to hitting number one on the charts in his home country of Costa Rica in 1968, Luis Muñoz’s life has consistently been filled with some form of musical endeavor, sourced from his deep appreciation for the lush natural world in Costa Rica, his time growing up, and studying at Santa Barbara’s own UCSB and SBCC, to going on to become an award-winning and revered composer, musician, and multi-instrumentalist. “However,” Muñoz notes, when describing his “no limits” approach to writing music, “jazz is at the center of it all.”