Tito Charneco might have been born to tell stories with the tenor saxophone.
The University of North Texas student was born in Brooklyn, that spot that has an ongoing arm-wrestling match with New Orleans over who incubates the world’s best jazz.
At age 4, he and his Puerto Rican parents moved back to the island. It was there that Charneco started studying the tenor saxophone.
On Sunday, he could win his first Grammy Award for his work on the bandstand at Town Hall in New York. He was among the musicians who gathered to play a jaw-dropping playlist for pianist, composer and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill. That night, O’Farrill and his guest soloists played a concert that became The Original Influencers: Dizzy, Chano & Chico.
The album is nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category. O’Farrill is a formidable talent and joins a small club of musicians by earning two nominations in a single category. Original Influencers faces O’Farrill’s Munduogua: Celebrating Carla Bley for the Grammy.
On Thursday night, Charneco talked from his home in New York City, where he commutes to UNT for his doctorate. He’s close to submitting his dissertation, which is a portfolio of studies and compositions based on the poetry of Puerto Rican writer and journalist Julia de Burgos.
Charneco was already a working musician, composing for bands in Puerto Rico by age 17. He didn’t have to get an education. But he was playing in a big band on a cruise ship when a friend in the band shared a sort of dark prediction.
“He said to me one night, ‘I’m going to UNT because this is a dead-end job, and I want to encourage you that you too should go to school if you want,’” Charneco said.
Months later, Charneco said his friend was on the Denton campus and made good on his promise to send him information.
Loyal to the sax
Before he came to Denton, where he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Charneco began his music studies in Puerto Rico. He said his mother told him his father had played the saxophone.
“I made up my mind right then that I was going to play the saxophone, because I wanted to be like my dad,” he said.
Eventually, the tenor saxophone claimed his loyalty.
“I hear everything in the key of B-flat, which is the key of the tenor saxophone,” Charneco said. “So I think that it was it was a real natural pairing. And then when I got to UNT for my undergrad, I made the decision that I was going to sell my alto, and I was just going to focus exclusively on tenor.”
He said some friends at UNT told him he was crazy to sell his alto sax. Without it, the number of gigs he could play would shorten.
“I just wanted to be a tenor saxophone player,” he said.
His music studies started with singing. When he was about 12 years old, he started band classes.
“I told the teacher that I wanted to play saxophone, and he said, ‘We’re out of saxophones. Here’s the trombone.’ And I said, ‘I do not want the trombone. I’m here to play the saxophone.’ I must have been stubborn enough that he eventually found me a saxophone.”
As he came of age in Puerto Rico, Charneco said he played in bands and started writing and transcribing popular music for bands. He still recalls his frustration when he started composing, when a mentor reviewed his work, offered feedback and so many orders to “go back and do it again.” The mentor told him to create charts and compose so that musicians could take his paper and turn it into sound.
Finding mentors at UNT
“I asked him, ‘What should I be doing?’ And he finally told me, ‘Just keep writing. Keep writing, and everything will start to fall in place,’” Charneco said. “And you know what? Everything did finally start to fall in place.’”
When he decided to go to school, he considered and applied to other schools: the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Miami, the University of Toronto and New York University. There was a moment when he thought he’d earn a degree in chemistry. But music called.
He ended up at UNT because it was the most affordable, but he soon found the historic jazz studies program a trove of talent and potential. Charneco credits his growth as an artist to the mentors he met and studied with at UNT: saxophonist Brad Leali, professor and percussionist José Aponte, jazz history scholar Kimberly Hannon Teal and ethnomusicologist Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden.
Charneco found that the UNT College of Music demands that musicians deepen their art while growing as technicians. But, he said, the university also challenges musicians to become more formal scholars. Most musicians curate expertise around their musical heroes and influences. UNT, however, urges musicians to research repertoire, composers, artists, and the events and eras that forged them.
His work with Leali has been especially productive; Leali challenged him to write a composition a week as he delved into his dissertation.
As for his Grammy-nominated work, Charneco has been playing in Arturo O’Farrill’s band for years.
“I was familiar with the work by his father,” Charneco said, referring to the work by Chico O’Farrill in Original Influencers. “He’s a legend in Latin jazz circles. And so then I became acquainted with the work of Arturo.”
Charneco is a freelance musician in New York City and has friends who play in Arturo O’Farrill’s band.
“One of those friends needed somebody to sub for him, and so I did,” Charneco said. “So I began to learn the music, and I think I did the gig for about six months.”
He didn’t meet O’Farrill for a time because the composer was teaching clear across the country, at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I remember the first day, the first gig where Arturo was playing. And the club was packed,” Charneco said. “I was the person closest to him. I saw him walk down the aisle and the manager looked at me and smiled. Like, ‘The boss is in tonight.’”
An American tapestry of jazz
Charneco knew the album was special. The concert was recorded in 2024, and was released in 2025. For Charneco, Original Influencers tells the story of how these American visionaries — Dizzy Gillespie, Chico O’Farrill and Chano Pozo — embedded their cultures and stories into a uniquely American artform.
The record sort of unfurls an American tapestry of jazz. The album has such scale, shimmying to the styles Gillespie creates, pulsing a luscious pair of hips to Pozo’s flamenco-tinged palette and spinning in O’Farrill’s block party.
For Charneco, Original Influencers connects the cultural constellation of American jazz through the vessels and marrow of these writers. He considers himself a beneficiary of Arturo O’Farrill’s passions and mastery.
“I know that the terms like these get overused often,” he said. “But just being visionaries, they look at: how can we get these rhythms that seem so distant to work together? And to be able to connect with the people while maintaining the aspects that are pure to jazz? If I could say in the trumpet playing of the bebop of Dizzy Gillespie, and then the rhythms that are pure Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Cuban music, and then they have the vision to write something that has never been written before stylistically, you know, genre-wise.”
Work fit for a Grammy nod
Charneco admires Chico O’Farrell’s decision to honor his Puerto Rican heritage when he wrote his breakthrough piece for record producer Norman Granz, a juggernaut of the 1940s and ’50s.
Original Influencers captures that rare concert event. You can hear the breathless anticipation in the crowd inside New York’s storied Town Hall. After a particularly gritty conversation between trumpet virtuoso Jon Faddis and saxophonist Donald Harrison on O’Farrill’s steamy tune — “On the Corner of Malecón and Bourbon” — the audience whoops and shouts. And when drummer Jacquelene Acevedo speed-dances after them on a drum solo? Spontaneous applause breaks out, and a man rips loose with a ferocious “Yeah!”
The tune is a testament to O’Farrill’s near-biological awareness of the environment that birthed jazz.
After Faddis, Harrison and Acevedo do a cha-cha-cha, the tune tapers and then bursts into the celebratory brash and flash that only a spasm band could produce on a weekend in the Big Easy. When the song pauses, a murmur washes through Town Hall before exploding into a street party in Malecón, an oceanfront district in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. You can almost hear the musicians grinning at the audience, teasing yelps and whistles from them.
Charneco has recorded and played with Grammy nominees before. This is his first project to win a nomination.
“I know that some artists might not consider the Grammy to be of note,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who feel a certain way about them, especially if someone didn’t get nominated. And that happens. ... For me, I think it has meaning. Anyone who says otherwise, they are probably saying that with some salt.”
The 68th Grammy Awards air at 7 p.m. Sunday on CBS. The televised ceremony highlights pop, rock and rap categories, with other categories, such as jazz, being announced during the portion that isn’t televised.