Pianist and composer Fabian Almazan. Since 1963, the Cintas Foundation has been awarding money to artists of Cuban descent living outside of Cuba, and earlier this month, a New World School of the Arts graduate was honored for his work as a composer.

Fabian Almazan was the $10,000 prize winner of the Brandon Fradd Award in Music Composition, distributed through Cintas and the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University and named after the managing partner of New York-based Apollo Medical Partners, a biotech hedge fund. (A runner-up prize went to California-based guitarist and composer Yalil Guerra.)

Judging by his Website, the 26-year-old Almazan is a composer very much of his time, heedless of old barriers against the mixing of different genres of music, and striving to create something new out of all that complexity. His résumé is seriously impressive; after four years at New World, graduating in 2002, he’s worked with Dave Brubeck and Giampaolo Bracali, and tours the world as the pianist for the fine jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard.

There are any number of Blanchard performances viewable on the Web in which you can hear Almazan play, but at his Website you can also hear his work in film music. Collage, for instance, is like its name a mix of many different kinds of styles, but it begins with a lovely, melancholy piano tune that suggests he hasn’t lost touch with the power of melody to make a strong musical impact.

In an e-mail message to me, Almazan said he was “moved” by his winning of the award, in part because a well-respected jury thought enough of his work to honor it, and in part because his win means he joins an honor roll of Cuban artists.

“It means a lot to me to be acknowledged as a part of the Cuban art scene in the U.S., trying to give energy to an artistic movement that in my opinion is very much needed,” he wrote. “Because I left Cuba at the age of eight, I’ve always been exploring what it means to be a Cuban-American living in these times, under the current circumstances, and how to genuinely convey this as a musician.”

Almazan said he submitted to Cintas two orchestral pieces, a suite for piano, Cuban percussion, choir and jazz rhythm section, some chamber works and a piece for jazz quintet. He describes his music as “just that, music,” saying that people learn new things everyday, and that should be reflected in the work.

“I want to write music that I would find interesting and fulfilling as a listener, [were I] to hear it by chance walking down the street,” Almazan wrote. “At this time, that to me means using woodwind instruments with a jazz mentality (jazz mentality of 2010) to provide different emotions for the listener to tap into, out of the spectrum of emotions that I feel I haven’t heard yet. It’s probably out there somewhere but I just haven’t heard it yet.

“And that’s not to say that I feel I can make it happen successfully, but I’m willing to give it a try,” he wrote.

One of the judges for the Fradd award was composer Richard Danielpour, who grew up in Palm Beach County and has gone on to a major career. I interviewed him at length earlier this year, and he’s a nice man with an eclectic compositional style who has managed to meld various influences well, and perhaps he saw a kindred spirit in Fabian Almazan.

Almazan is the kind of composer and musician that I’m seeing a lot more of these days, players and writers who can do just about anything in any style. As little as 30 years ago, you rarely heard composers who were as confident about their multi-genre language as today’s writers; what you got was a classical composer “slumming” with non-persuasive swing, or a jazz composer reaching out for classical gravitas and coming up short.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with Almazan, and I’m confident we’ll be hearing good things about him for some time to come.