Avo Uvezian
Armenian-American jazz pianist who created the AVO cigar brand in 1988 and remained its public figure until his death in 2017.
Uvezian was born in 1926 into an Armenian family and worked for decades as a jazz pianist and composer, with a career that took him from the Middle East to the United States and eventually to Puerto Rico. He came to cigars comparatively late, commissioning a private blend in the Dominican Republic in the mid-1980s and putting it on the market in 1988 under his first name.
The blending was done with Hendrik Kelner, the Dominican manufacturer behind the Davidoff line, and the two brands have shared a construction discipline and a mild-to-medium house style ever since. Oettinger Davidoff acquired AVO and has run it as a distinct brand within its portfolio, extending it with the XO, Domaine, Heritage and Syncro families. The Dominican operation gave the brand a consistent manufacturing base from the start.
He remained the brand's ambassador into his late eighties, appearing at events with a piano as reliably as with a humidor, and an annual limited release tied to his birthday has run for many years. Uvezian died on 24 March 2017 at the age of 91. Few cigar brands have been built so directly on a single individual's public presence, and the company has continued to trade on it since his death.