ALEX SINO

Alex Sino is a Latin GRAMMY Award-winning American producer, songwriter, filmmaker, author and actor whose career has unfolded across music, film, publishing and healthcare leadership.
For more than two decades, Sino has built projects around an idea that has remained remarkably consistent: musicians, cultures and artistic traditions become more interesting when they are allowed to meet.
That approach has brought him into creative collaborations with more than 280 musicians, composers and producers, among them Al Di Meola, Arturo Sandoval, Leonid Agutin, Jon Secada, Diego Torres, Omara Portuondo, Luis Enrique, Amaury Gutiérrez, Macy Gray, MC Solaar, Xavier Naidoo, Dr. Ed Calle, Anthony Jackson, Vinnie Colaiuta, Orlando “Maraca” Valle, Richard Bravo, Milton Salcedo, Rudy Pérez and others.
Sino’s role has rarely been confined to a single discipline. As a producer, songwriter, lyricist and filmmaker, he has often shaped projects from their initial creative concept through recording and visual production, while his more recent work has extended into actinga and writing.
Running parallel to that creative career was another life altogether: for years Sino was a healthcare executive in New York, including service as a Vice President and member of the Executive Administration of Beth Israel Medical Center.
The combination makes his biography difficult to place within one conventional profession. Music, however, has always been the thread running through it.

COSMOPOLITAN LIFE
One of the projects that first defined Sino’s international music career began with an unlikely musical encounter.
Russian singer-songwriter Leonid Agutin and American jazz guitarist Al Di Meola came from very different musical worlds. Sino became one of the people responsible for turning that encounter into a sustained recording and performance collaboration.
The result was Cosmopolitan Life, released internationally in 2005.
Sino served as executive producer and lyricist/songwriter on the album. His credits extend throughout the record, including songs such as “Cosmopolitan Life,” “Cuba Africa,” “Nobody,” “Price to Learn,” “Tango,” “Smile,” “Portofino,” “If I’ll Get a Chance,” “Blue River” and “Shade of Your World.”
The project brought together Di Meola’s unmistakable guitar language with Agutin’s compositions and a rhythmically eclectic ensemble, moving between jazz, Latin music and pop without attempting to fit comfortably into any one of them.
It was also the beginning of something larger than an album.
From the Studio to the European Stage
Following the release of Cosmopolitan Life, the Agutin–Di Meola collaboration developed into an international live project.
Sino’s work expanded from producing the recording to producing and developing performances and television appearances connected with the project.
In 2005, he produced Al Di Meola’s participation in Premio Italiani nel Mondo, held at the Vittoriano in Piazza Venezia in Rome and broadcast on RAI Uno.
The European performance period also included Stuttgart, Germany, and appearances connected with Jūrmala and Riga, Latvia. The project reached one of its most significant stages in 2006 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
There were also performances and television projects in Germany, including a production connected with the Eurovision environment, as well as concerts in Russia and elsewhere.
The importance of this period in Sino’s career was not simply the number of performances. Cosmopolitan Life had demonstrated that a recording conceived across national and musical boundaries could survive outside the studio and become an international touring concept.
The collaboration was also documented on film in a project associated with Austrian filmmakers Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, internationally known for their extensive work with Queen and Freddie Mercury. Sino is credited on screen as Audio Producer.

VOCAL RENDEZVOUS
Sino’s collaboration with Al Di Meola continued beyond Cosmopolitan Life.
He worked as producer on Vocal Rendezvous, a project that placed Di Meola alongside a wide range of vocalists and collaborators. The album became another example of the approach Sino favored: rather than treating jazz as a closed musical language, the project allowed Di Meola’s playing to interact with singers and styles from different parts of contemporary music.
The project included artists associated with a broad international spectrum, including Macy Gray and Angie Stone, among others. Sino’s producer credit is preserved in the release metadata maintained through Pier 5’s professional distribution system.

CUBA
Cuba became another important point on Sino’s musical map.
His projects there included collaborations and performances involving musicians such as Omara Portuondo, Arturo Sandoval, Orlando “Maraca” Valle, Pancho Amat and Leonid Agutin.
Sino co-produced concert, recording and film projects in Havana, including work connected with Havana Calling and Reencuentros: Live at the Grand Theater of Havana. The latter was recorded at the García Lorca Concert Hall of the Gran Teatro de La Habana. The project was subsequently nominated for a Cubadisco Award, Cuba’s principal annual recording-industry honors.
These projects further expanded the principle behind Cosmopolitan Life: musicians did not need to share nationality, language or musical history in order to find common ground. For Sino, Cuba also became an important bridge toward the Latin projects that would occupy an increasingly large part of his later career.

LA VIDA COSMOPOLITA
Fifteen years after Cosmopolitan Life, the idea behind the project returned in a different form.
La Vida Cosmopolita, released in 2020, was Leonid Agutin’s first Spanish-language album and a far more extensive immersion into Latin music. Sino produced and co-wrote the project.
Rather than recreating the earlier Agutin–Di Meola formula, La Vida Cosmopolita was built around an international circle of guest artists and musicians. Its featured performers included Diego Torres, Jon Secada, Amaury Gutiérrez and Al Di Meola.
The recording sessions brought in an equally distinguished group of instrumentalists and producers, including Richard Bravo, Camilo Valencia, Dr. Ed Calle, Milton Salcedo, Dan Warner, Julio Hernández, René Luis Toledo and a large Miami horn section.
The record moves through salsa, merengue, vallenato, samba, danzón, cha-cha-cha, flamenco, funk, rock and pop. Its identity comes less from any individual genre than from the way those languages coexist.
For Sino, La Vida Cosmopolita was the continuation of an idea that had begun many years earlier: Cosmopolitan Life was never meant to describe geography. It described a way of making music.
The Collaborations
“Just a Rainy Day” reunited Agutin with Al Di Meola. Sino wrote lyrics for the song, returning directly to the creative relationship that had begun during Cosmopolitan Life.
“Ella” brought Agutin together with two-time GRAMMY Award winner Jon Secada, who not only performed on the recording but participated in adapting the song into Spanish. Sino was among its writers.
“Enamorado” featured Cuban singer-songwriter Amaury Gutiérrez.
And “Quédate,” featuring Argentine singer-songwriter and actor Diego Torres, became one of the project’s most distinctive songs and films.

QUÉDATE
“Quédate” was created during the COVID period, when the idea of staying, separation and memory had suddenly acquired a different meaning.
Sino worked as a producer and co-author of the project and developed the concept for its video. The film incorporated family archival material connected with Lolita Torres, Diego Torres’s mother—the legendary Argentine actress and singer whose career had made her an iconic figure far beyond Argentina.
Instead of treating the archive simply as nostalgic footage, Sino used it as part of the narrative. Past and present, family memory and contemporary performance were placed in the same visual space.
The resulting film received international recognition and press coverage in Latin America. It also demonstrated a direction that was becoming increasingly important in Sino’s work: a song no longer necessarily ended when the recording was finished. The image could become part of the composition.

FUNKY CHA AND VISUAL STORYTELLING
During the La Vida Cosmopolita period, Sino produced a series of videos accompanying the album, including “Funky Cha,” “Quédate,” “Ella,” “Sobreviviré” and “Enamorado.”
These projects accelerated his development as a filmmaker and creative producer. “Funky Cha” traveled through the international festival circuit and received recognition including the Rome Film Awards and an international film festival award in Nice.
Other videos from the period received recognition in Europe, Australia, Latin America and the United States. Film was becoming a parallel language in Sino’s work rather than simply a marketing tool for music.

JUST A RAINY DAY
“Just a Rainy Day” became one of the clearest examples of Sino’s songwriting and visual work converging.
The song grew from the musical relationship established with Al Di Meola and from the broader La Vida Cosmopolita project. It subsequently received major songwriting recognition, including honors in the USA Songwriting Competition and the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the World Music category.
Its associated film also received international festival recognition, including awards in Australia and Argentina. What began as a song consequently developed into a project with several independent lives: composition, recording, performance and film.

PIER 5
Behind many of these projects is Pier 5, the independent entertainment, record and music publishing company founded by Alex Sino.
Pier 5 developed into the organizational home for recordings spanning jazz, Latin music, crossover projects, film music and contemporary interpretations of classical repertoire.
Pier 5 operates as a record label with a substantial release catalog distributed through professional music-distribution infrastructure. Pier 5 Ltd. is also a registered BMI music publisher, with its own publisher account and IPI registration.
The Pier 5 publishing repertoire includes compositions associated with Cosmopolitan Life, La Vida Cosmopolita, Made in Miami, “Just a Rainy Day,” “Funky Cha,” “Quédate” and other projects. Sino himself maintains a separate BMI writer catalog containing more than thirty registered works.
Pier 5 therefore became more than a label attached to recordings. It provided Sino with a structure through which songwriting, publishing, production, recording, film and distribution could remain connected.

MADE IN MIAMI
The Miami musicians who had played an important role in La Vida Cosmopolita became central to the next major chapter.
In 2022, Sino produced Made in Miami with Camilo Valencia and Richard Bravo. The album brought together musicians deeply rooted in Latin jazz and the Miami recording community.
Among its featured artists were legendary Cuban-American trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, saxophonist Dr. Ed Calle, pianist Milton Salcedo, bassist Rafael “Fafa” Valencia and other leading players.
The record was instrumental, placing the focus on arrangement, ensemble playing and the musical personality of Miami itself.
At the 24th Annual Latin GRAMMY Awards in 2023, Alex Sino became a Latin GRAMMY Award winner through his work on the project.
The album he produced, Made in Miami, received two Latin GRAMMY Awards: Best Instrumental Album and Best Arrangement for “Songo Bop.”
The distinction matters: Sino is personally a 2023 Latin GRAMMY Award winner; Made in Miami is the two-time Latin GRAMMY-winning album he produced.

A NEW CLASSICAL CROSSOVER PERIOD
After Made in Miami, Sino increasingly turned toward another musical question: what happens when classical repertoire is allowed to live outside the concert hall?
Working closely with producer, composer and arranger Terry Heimat, Sino developed a series of projects combining classical source material with contemporary orchestration, jazz musicians, Latin rhythms, film and storytelling.
The collaborations included projects such as Magic Song, The Power of Nature, The House of Dreams, Domus Solis, Alma Libre and ultimately Funky Sonatas. The musicians participating across these recordings have included Al Di Meola, Arturo Sandoval, Ed Calle, Richard Bravo, Milton Salcedo, Amaury Gutiérrez, Francis Goya and others.

ALMA LIBRE
Alma Libre continued Sino’s relationship with the musicians who had become part of the Pier 5 musical circle.
Produced by Alex Sino, Terry Heimat and Richard Bravo, the project included Arturo Sandoval, Milton Salcedo, guitarist Francis Goya, pianist Mario Parmisano, violinist Kostia Lucky, trumpeter Julio Ariel Diaz, bassist Jerry Bravo and Rafael “Fafa” Valencia, among others.
The project helped establish the musical environment from which Funky Sonatas would develop.

FUNKY SONATAS
With Funky Sonatas, Sino and Terry Heimat pushed the classical crossover idea further.
The project brings the music and musical worlds associated with Sergei Rachmaninoff, Astor Piazzolla, Ennio Morricone, Gato Barbieri and Lalo Schifrin into dialogue with jazz and Latin rhythm.
The premise was never to modernize classical music simply for the sake of novelty. It was to see what survives.
A melody can change rhythm. A familiar theme can move from orchestra to piano, trumpet, saxophone or percussion. Musicians separated by generations can effectively meet inside the same arrangement.
The project brought together an exceptional international ensemble including Arturo Sandoval, Svetlana Smolina, Dr. Ed Calle, Milton Salcedo, Anthony Jackson, Vinnie Colaiuta, Orlando “Maraca” Valle, David Pastor, Francis Goya, Richard Bravo, Mario Parmisano, Alex Alexander, Rayko B., Fafa Valencia and others.
For Sino, Funky Sonatas returns to the principle that has followed him since Cosmopolitan Life: music should not become a museum.

FILM
Film developed gradually out of Sino’s musical work. At first, moving images accompanied songs. Then the visual narrative began to acquire equal weight.
He produced and developed music videos, documentaries and short films that traveled through international festivals, with projects including STAY, “Funky Cha,” “Just a Rainy Day,” “Magic Song” and Made in Miami receiving awards or festival recognition.
His work has been recognized by festivals and competitions in the United States, Italy, France, Australia, Argentina and elsewhere.
This progression eventually brought Sino somewhere he had rarely been before: in front of the camera.

MINOTAUR
Sino appeared as an actor in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur.
For someone whose film career had developed primarily as a producer, writer and creative force behind the camera, acting represented an unexpected turn.
The project placed him inside the creative world of one of contemporary cinema’s most internationally recognized directors and connected his work with the international film-festival circuit, including Cannes.
Sino’s participation in Minotaur was not a decision to exchange producing for acting. It was another opportunity to understand storytelling from a different position. After years of directing musicians, developing films and building performances, he was suddenly the person being directed.

WRITING
Long before his recent audio storytelling projects, Sino had also begun writing books.
His published work includes The Limitless Music (2019), a book drawing on his experience in music and the music business, and The Grand Old Man.
His later writing includes The Theft of the Century: A Mona Lisa Tale and Mahler’s Prank, created with Terry Heimat.
The books extend interests already present throughout his musical and film work: history, memory, artistic creation and the strange ways in which culture survives the people who created it.

MAHLER’S PRANK
Mahler’s Prank brought Sino’s writing directly back into music.
Created with Terry Heimat, the project combines spoken narrative, poetry and music by Gustav Mahler, with additional music and arrangements by Heimat.
The recording is narrated by Andrei Zavodyuk, Terry Heimat and Alex Sino, with poetry and lyrics by Sino.
It is simultaneously a literary work, a music project and an audio performance. That ambiguity is intentional.

THE OTHER CAREER: HEALTHCARE
There is another side of Sino’s biography that would appear to have almost nothing to do with records, films or books.
For years, he worked in healthcare administration in New York.
Sino served as a Vice President and member of Beth Israel Medical Center’s Executive Administration, with broad responsibilities encompassing patient access, physician services, business development and major patient-centered initiatives.
His work included the Patient Navigator Program, the Heritage Initiative, Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program, and work with the Louis Armstrong Department of Music Therapy. He was also involved with initiatives surrounding patient access and programs intended to make an enormous urban medical institution more navigable for individual patients and families.
It was a serious executive career running in parallel with his creative work.
And yet the two worlds were perhaps not as unrelated as they first appear. Producing a complicated record can involve dozens of musicians, arrangers, engineers, studios, contracts and countries. Running complex healthcare programs requires another kind of coordination among people, institutions and competing priorities.
In both cases, Sino found himself doing much the same thing: building a structure in which specialists could do their best work.

A CAREER BETWEEN WORLDS
It would be easier to describe Alex Sino if he had stayed in one place. He did not.
His career has moved from New York hospitals to recording studios in Miami; from collaborations with Al Di Meola to concerts in Rome, Stuttgart, Latvia and Montreux; from Havana and Latin music to Rachmaninoff and Mahler; from songwriting to filmmaking; from producing actors to becoming one.
There have been recurring characters along the way. Al Di Meola reappeared years after Cosmopolitan Life. Musicians from La Vida Cosmopolita became part of Made in Miami. The Miami circle expanded into later Pier 5 projects. Classical music entered the story, but the jazz and Latin musicians never entirely left it.
The projects changed. The method did not.
Sino has repeatedly built situations in which people who might never otherwise have shared a record, a stage or a film find themselves working together.
A Russian songwriter and an American jazz guitarist. A Cuban trumpet legend and a classical pianist. An Argentine pop star and his mother’s archival films. Rachmaninoff and a Latin rhythm section. Mahler and contemporary spoken word. Music and medicine.
It is an unconventional résumé. But after more than two decades, the apparent contradictions have become the biography itself.

AWARDS & HONORS
Master inventory for the official website. Latin GRAMMY entries are intentionally shown as three separate lines while distinguishing Sino’s personal winner status from the album’s two awards.