[5] Here, his father Chico found work as music director for the CBS program "Festival of Lively Arts", where he formed relationships with jazz musicians Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, and Stan Getz.

[5] However Chico also worked with many Latin music artists such as Tito Puente, Machito, Celia Cruz, and La Lupe, which, for son Arturo, led to a "psychotic upbringing" in which he was unsure of his own cultural identity.

[7] Eschewing his father's musical style, O'Farrill instead chose to focus on other forms of jazz, listening to artists such as Bud Powell and Chick Corea.

After leaving the Carla Bley Big Band, O'Farrill found solo work with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Howard Johnson, Steve Turre, and Lester Bowie.

[11] In 1997 the Chico O'Farrill Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra began to play at Birdland each Sunday night,[13] and when his father died in 2001 Arturo became bandleader.

[7] In 2008 O'Farrill released his second album with the ALJO, the Grammy-winning Song for Chico,[18] and also took up residency as an assistant professor at State University of New York at Purchase.

Reflective of big band traditions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and elsewhere,[24] his music is described as stylistically "pan-Latin" by critic Dan Bilawsky.

[25] Philip Booth of JazzTimes writes that the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra's 2011 record 40 Acres and a Burro "has the big-band digging deeper into the textures and rhythms of South America and the Caribbean" than ever before.

[27] On August 14, 2015, O'Farrill was among those who were invited to witness the moment the U.S. flag was raised over a reopened U.S. Embassy in Cuba for the first time in 54 years.

[28][29] With Ray Barretto, Michael Philip Mossman, and Patato Valdez With Carla Bley With Chico O'Farrill With Bebo Valdés