For drummer-composer Antonio Sanchez’ 52nd birthday, here are two feature articles: First, a profile that I had the honor to write about him for Jazziz in 2015, framed around his soundtrack for the film Birdman and two contemporaneous releases, followed by a cover story for Jazz Times framed around the 2020 release Bad Hombre.
*_*_*_*_
Beyond Birdman, Jazziz, 2015
In the program notes for his new release, The Meridian Suite, Antonio Sanchez draws an explicit analogy between the raw materials of his long-form, 55-minute work and the invisible pathways along which energy flows through the human body, even the lines that criss-cross the globe and the celestial spheres. These days, Sanchez’s Q score is as high as any living drummer after 15 years of constant touring with Pat Metheny and the release last year of the widely admired solo-drum soundtrack that he created for the award-winning feature film Birdman, yet he was thinking of matters more prosaic than chakras and qi when he titled the ambitious five-part Meridian Suite.
Specifically, it gestated in a hotel room in Meridian, Mississippi, after an October 2012 concert by Metheny’s Unity Band. Sanchez saved a 5/4 motif that he had conceived, then named the file for the location. In 2014, at the beginning of a 10-month tour with Unity Band, Sanchez was pondering the next step that his quartet, Migration, might take after the previous year’s release of its eight-tune album New Life. “I remembered this cool intro that I thought was OK,” he recalls. “I listened and liked it again. That’s a good sign.” Working in short spurts while on the road, he added more sections, realized it would be a suite, and began to trace the metaphysical connections.
I spoke to Sanchez, 43, on a balmy May afternoon at the airy one-bedroom Jackson Heights co-op that he shares with his fiancé, singer Thana Alexa. He had recently returned from a 17-concert, seven-clinic sojourn to Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Finland, Italy and England with the personnel from Meridian Suite (tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, pianist John Escreet and bassist Matt Brewer), with whom he’ll tour extensively to support the CD during the remainder of this year. He and Alexa had spent the previous week house-hunting in neighboring Brooklyn, motivated more by practical imperatives than dissatisfaction with their current premises. “This place is super-quiet and beautiful, but I can’t practice, because it disturbs the neighbors,” Sanchez says.
The strength of Sanchez’s playing on Meridian Suite and the simultaneously released Three Times Three— both on the CamJazz imprint — demonstrates that attenuated practice time has been anything but an impediment. On the former date, he creates sections tailored to the tonal personalities of his bandmates, including Alexa’s powerful contralto. She sometimes doubles with Blake’s bass clarinet-sounding EWI (Electric Wind Interface) passages, which are reminiscent of vintage Mini Moog. Escreet contributes skronky Fender Rhodes; Adam Rogers interpolates high-octane guitar. Sanchez propels the flow with complex rhythmic figures drawn from rock, fusion, swing, electronica, Afro-Caribbean and free-bop. He executes them with an extravagantly detailed attention to texture, as on “Channels of Energy,” the third section, for which he compressed the drum sound in post-production, put a pillow inside his 20-inch bass drum to make it sound like a rock kit, and used piccolo and soprano snare drums.
“I’m tuning everything a little lower than I used to,” Sanchez says. “I like getting more meat from the drums. On a regular jazz record, you keep the sound consistent and don’t change the tuning for just one piece, but here it felt right.”
Sanchez says that his “first albums were mostly about improvisation, with everyone soloing over the form.” He mentions his 2007 debut, [igration, on which Metheny and Chick Corea (with whom he toured and recorded that year) blew a tune apiece with tenorists David Sánchez and Chris Potter and bassist Scott Colley, and its 2008 successor, Live in New York at Jazz Standard, on which alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón replaced Potter. “The approach was, ‘Let’s get in the studio and record some tunes.’ But Meridian Suite is the most structured thing I’ve done. We did it to a click, which I completely mapped out on the computer. I learned that from Pat, as well as compositional things and production elements.”
In the notes, Sanchez compares Meridian Suite to “a musical novel instead of a group of short stories,” in which the composition develops analogously to “the way a novelist develops a story and its characters.” He acknowledges as an antecedent Metheny’s 2005 long-form epic The Way Up, on which he played. He adds that he shares with Metheny an aesthetic of contextualizing complex musical ideas within an epic narrative frame. “Music without storytelling doesn’t hold my attention,” Sanchez says. “My tunes can be over 10 minutes, because I love to tell that story as fully as I can. That’s why Meridian Suite was such a cool vehicle to tell a story over a longer period of time. Most of the stuff I’ve been influenced by my whole life seemed to come out.”
He continues: “I love the show aspect of things. I don’t like being in bands where you play the first tune, then discuss what you’re going to play next on stage while people are waiting. So, as a bandleader, I really like to plan. I grew up listening to rock and fusion, which is very arranged, and my attitude descends from that — but Pat’s methodology rubbed off on me.”
Metheny discovered Sanchez in Turin in 2000, when, while dining backstage after a performance, he heard the Danilo Pérez Trio playing onstage. He remarked, “The drummer and percussionist are playing really well together.” The promoter responded, “No, it’s just one guy.” Metheny decided to verify, and watched Sanchez operate. In London soon thereafter, Metheny attended the trio’s second set at Pizza Express, and asked Sanchez for his email address.
“Pat sent a long note that described in detail everything he liked about what he heard, and then posed some questions, like a job application,” Sanchez recalls. “He asked if I considered myself someone who could play any style or just did jazz. Did I consider myself someone who is stable? Did I like going on the road or not? Then he asked: ‘What are you doing next Thursday? Do you want to play?’
“His vision is very specific, and learning the parameters — which are very clear — was the hardest part. The first time we played, we did ‘Turnaround’ and then ‘All the Things You Are.’ Then Pat asked, ‘What would you play behind this?’ I started playing a rhythm I knew from the Pat Metheny Group that I thought would fit. Pat said, ‘Try 30 percent less with your left hand and 10 percent more with your hi-hat, and maybe 50 percent more, or 52 percent (he was seriously like that), with your right hand on the cymbal.’ He was half-joking, but completely serious. It was his way of telling me, ‘I need you to have that much command of your instrument.’ That was mind-boggling. Luckily, I was at a point where I could do it.”
BREAK
Less scripted than Meridian Suite, but as cohesive, are the performances on Three Times Three, released in Europe in 2014. Three separate trios for which the only possible description is “all star” — pianist Brad Mehldau and Brewer, guitarist John Scofield and bassist Christian McBride, and tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and bassist John Patitucci — play two Sanchez originals and a rearranged standard apiece. Himself a classical-piano student before migrating from Mexico City to Boston’s Berklee School of Music in 1993, Sanchez devoted particular attention to writing pieces that Mehldau “could sink his teeth into.” These include a reharmonization of “Nardis” and a 14-minute original called “Constellations” that occupied 15 pages of sheet music. “I got carried away,” Sanchez says. “I’d told Brad it would be an easy blowing session, so he was a little ticked off. But he had it down in no time.”
For Lovano and Patitucci, Sanchez offered the aria-like “Firenze” on which Lovano milks the melody like an operatic tenor. There’s an outer-partials, tempo-shifting treatment of Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You” that Sanchez compares to “a race car that you can steer in any direction.” Scofield and McBride plumb the harmonic riches of Wayne Shorter’s “Fall,” and hit a deep, funky pocket on “Nooks and Crannies,” of which Sanchez says, “I can’t imagine another guitarist playing it.”
“Antonio writes for the occasion,” says vibraphonist Gary Burton, whose third album with Sanchez is 2013’s Guided Tour, which begins with the drummer’s “Caminos” and ends with his “Monk Fish.” “His pieces are tailored very much to my strengths and what interests me as a player. When you explain and demonstrate a new song, he picks it up immediately, and you hardly have to think about it.”
McBride, who toured and recorded with Sanchez on various Metheny projects from 2003 to 2008, elaborates further on his qualities. “He’s one of my few friends I can make inappropriate jokes with,” the bassist says. “When Antonio told me he was doing his first CD, I said, ‘Oh, that means you’re going to get everybody else to do the writing for you, right?’ But when I heard it, I was shocked. I said, ‘When did you write that? We were together almost a year; I never saw you at the piano.’ I have to point to his work ethic. You’d be hard-pressed to find a drummer who practices as hard as he does, just on technique and learning forms and how to play inside and outside those forms.”
Sanchez has put in his time, and then some, since his teens in Mexico City, when he spent mornings at the Escuela Superior de Musica, afternoons in regular high school and evenings training in gymnastics (he was a member of Mexico’s Junior National Team). From age 13, he found time to play occasional rock gigs on drums. Fearing burnout, he dropped out of high school with his mother’s blessing, and “immersed myself way deeper into music and gymnastics at that level.”
He modeled his discipline and professionalism from examples in his immediate family. His grandfather, the esteemed actor Ignacio Lopez Tarso, is still active at 90. “He’d have to be about to die to miss a performance,” Sanchez says. His mother, Susana, still in her teens when she had him, “was single and working from the beginning. She studied literature and philosophy, and was a film critic for years. She took me to rock shows and the symphony, and to the theater to see my grandfather. When I was super-heavy into rock drumming, she tried to play me an Art Blakey record, but I had no interest.”
A family friend gave Sanchez drum lessons at 6, teaching “basic technique and how to play along with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.” Later, Sanchez took three lessons with Tino Contreras, “the Buddy Rich of Mexico.” Otherwise, he learned by doing, playing along with progressive rock and fusion records, and emulating the examples of Dave Weckl, Vinnie Colaiuta and Dennis Chambers on hard-to-come-by videotapes. “I’d devour them for days on end, very methodically,” he recalls. “I’d put a mirror before my drum set and check that my hand position was exactly like theirs. I learned a lot that way. Most people I was playing with in rock bands weren’t as serious as me, and I thought if I got better I’d be able to play with different people. That led me to Latin jazz and fusion, and I got more technique and general knowledge.”
At Berklee, Sanchez, who had elected to study piano because “I thought I knew everything there was to know about the drums,” discovered that his self-regard was illusory. “I had chops, and a lot of drumming friends told me I could play, but I didn’t know left from right,” he says. During first semester, an instructor spotted him with his stick-bag and suggested he attend a bebop ensemble. “I brought my humongous kit, with a 22-inch bass drum, 7 cymbals and double-bass pedal.” The group began playing Sonny Rollins’ hard-bop classic “Pent-Up House.” After adjusting to the time feel, Sanchez “started blowing as many chops as I could — and I had some fancy ones. I thought I was impressing the hell out of everyone.” The instructor approached, “and started taking my drum set apart as I was playing. He left me with a hi-hat, bass drum, snare drum and ride cymbal, and told me, ‘Now solo in the form and trade choruses.’ I built myself up from there.”
While matriculated, Sanchez studied and jammed every day for hours. “I would volunteer for anything,” he says. “I was afraid of tendinitis because I was playing way too much.” Already playing frequently with Zenón, a fellow student, Sanchez developed a relationship with Pérez, six years his senior, then on faculty at New England Conservatory. “Danilo took me under his wing,” Sanchez says. “We’d have lunch and listen to music, and he started to come to a lot of my gigs. Then an opportunity arose to study with him at NEC. The lessons were mostly about rhythm. But my plan was, ‘Danilo, I love that tune of yours; how does it go?’ I’d pretend I didn’t know it well, although I did. He basically started training me for the job without even knowing it.”
Pérez was in the vanguard of a cohort of generational contemporaries from the nations shaped by the collision of the Iberian and African diasporas who focused not only on playing jazz with idiomatic fluency, but also on exploring their own cultural heritage. “I met a lot of students from Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela and Puerto Rico who all seemed to be so connected with their music,” Sanchez remembers. “I was almost envious. Mexican music was always in my life, but it didn’t draw me to want to write something Mexican-sounding or grab a Mexican rhythm and incorporate it. I wanted to play jazz, not be pigeonholed into Latin music, even though I loved it and it came easily to me. It has too many rules. Clave is so embedded in the culture that people have fist fights, and I wasn’t interested in being part of that, especially since I didn’t grow up playing it. We’re close to the U.S. and the Caribbean. We have a lot of influence from everywhere.”
After joining Pérez’s trio in 1998, following a consequential stint —on Pérez’s recommendation — with Paquito D’Rivera’s United Nations Orchestra, Sanchez developed his mature style. “Danilo made me jump from student to a high level in a relatively short amount of time because we played so much and so intensely,” he says. “You can’t slouch for one second in a piano trio, and his physical and psychological approach exhausted me at first. We would play the Afro-Cuban and Panamanian rhythms and bend the rules, as we did later in Miguel’s and David Sánchez’s bands with Puerto Rican rhythms. It was a new way to combine Latin music with jazz and make it open. I started experimenting with different sounds on the kit, exploiting the size of the drums, the rims, cross-stick combinations. When I started transitioning to other kinds of music, that stayed in my playing. It’s become my own sound, in a way.
“My own band really should have no rules. The name Migration has a lot to do with my story — leaving Mexico, leaving my family and coming here — but everyone in the band is from somewhere else. I’ve played with immigrants my whole life. If what we play comes from Latin influence, great. If it comes from rock or jazz, great. But I don’t want to pigeonhole in any way, shape or form.”
SIDEBAR
Movie Music
Sanchez’ storytelling mojo may have reached an apogee in the solo-drum soundtrack that he created for Birdman, available on Milan Records, which aurally depicts the lead character’s descent into madness. Perhaps it’s because his connection to director Alejandro Iñárritu, who is eight years Sanchez’s senior, has deep roots.
“I started checking out Pat after hearing the Pat Metheny Group on Iñárritu’s radio show, when he was a deejay in Mexico City,” Sanchez says. “Then he came to hear us in 2005, when we were touring The Way Up, and we met. Nice guy, super-unassuming. We hit it off. We kept in touch. When he’d come to New York for, say, a screening of his movies, he’d call me. When I was in L.A., I’d call him, and he’d come to my gigs if he was around. He’s a hoot. I’ve never met anyone more Mexican than he is. The connection was easy.
“When he called me for the project, he put me on the spot. ‘Do you want to do it or not? Are you into it?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’ll send you the script.’ I thought it could either be amazing or a train wreck. He said it was a dark comedy, but I didn’t laugh once the whole time I read the script. It would be the equivalent of me sending him the charts to my music, and ‘This is the idea for my new record,’ and expecting him to decipher what it’s going to be in the end.”
Thinking Iñárritu wanted something scripted and specific, Sanchez wrote separate rhythmic themes for the different characters. Iñárritu praised the results, but told him he wanted the opposite — “something jazzy, improvised, very organic.” Toward that end, Iñárritu talked to Sanchez about each scene, then sat facing him as he improvised so that they could imagine it together, raising his hand whenever he wanted to denote a shift to the next phase of the scene.
“As a jazz musician you react to your surroundings — to your band, or somebody else’s music, or to what I just played, if I’m playing by myself,” Sanchez says. “So reacting to the storyline or to an image, once we had an image to react to, wasn’t that different. It wasn’t conscious; you see something, your brain goes there, and you play something. You don’t have time to think about it. But most of the time, if you’ve done it enough, that part of your brain makes the right decision. I was just reacting to what was going on.”
***********************
Antonio Sánchez: Not Such a Bad Hombre After All
I can personally testify that Antonio Sánchez, who adopted the sobriquet “Bad Hombre” several years ago for a solo drums-and-electronics album, is a truly nice guy. On Labor Day afternoon, Sánchez and Thana Alexa, his wife and bandmate, who’d flown home early after playing the Detroit Jazz Festival the night before, showed me extreme hospitality when I visited their Jackson Heights apartment, two weeks after my initial Zoom conversation with Sánchez from his mother’s Mexico City home. Then, on the subway home, my digital voice recorder fell from my bag—the journalist’s worst fear. After receiving my mortified text, Sánchez immediately offered a do-over. “Things happen,” he said during the Zoom makeup, with a de nada shrug.
They’d been in Detroit with Sánchez’s Bad Hombres y Mujeres quartet, playing repertoire from his second Bad Hombre release, SHIFT (Warner Music), a 16-track drums-and-voice extravaganza on which he reimagines and remixes songs contributed by the likes of Lila Downs, Dave Matthews, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Trent Reznor, to name a shortlist of high Q-score participants. Sánchez recounted that Alexa sang everything, modifying her powerful, nuanced contralto with pedal-triggered harmonic-layering doublers and, when tackling parts written by the men, pitch-altering octavers; Big Yuki sound-explored on keyboards and synths; Lex Sadler fulfilled the groove function on electric bass and keyboard bass, and maneuvered on Ableton Live to manipulate backing tracks from the album for the band to play with, as well as opening up sections for interaction and soloing.
The 51-year-old drummer/composer assembled SHIFT during the COVID lockdown, using the compact basement studio he’d organized to execute film score commissions after creating the Grammy-winning solo drum soundtrack for Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman in 2014. The new project gestated in 2018, when Sánchez, newly signed with Warner after the first Bad Hombre release, was looking for a fresh concept. While in Mexico City, he heard Silvana Estrada, a friend, perform “El Agua y la Miel” solo, accompanying herself on cuatro. He’d played it with her years before at New York’s now-departed 55 Bar.
“It’s a haunting, hypnotic, linear theme,” Sánchez says. “As Silvana did it, I was hearing drums and synths, different basses, different harmonies, all these peaks and valleys. I decided to ask her to let me see what I could do. She recorded the voice and cuatro separately with a metronome, and sent it to me. I removed the cuatro in some place[s] and changed the harmony. A bunch of instruments I’d bought for a film score were lying around, and I started layering guitars and mandolin—and also a lot of drums. After a month or two, I sent it to her. She told me, ‘I never thought my tune could do this; I never imagined it being so epic.’”
He decided to extrapolate this m.o. into an album, and started thinking of artists to whom he might reach out. Ultimately, Sánchez harvested songs from the aforementioned individuals as well as a pan-lingual cohort including Kimbra, MARO, Ana Tijoux, SONICA (a three-woman group with Alexa, singer Nicole Zuraitis and bassist Julia Adamy), Alexa herself, and the guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. He bookends the program with vignettes on which the eminent actor Ignacio López Tarso, Sánchez’ grandfather, emcees, backgrounded by a street soundscape of voices and organilla from an imaginary town plaza, “inviting everybody to come in and sit down, fasten your seatbelts, and please pay attention to the bad hombre, because he’s got a lot of secrets for you.”
“My pitch to the artists was: ‘I would like you to give me a song,’” Sánchez recounted. “‘It could be old. It could be new. It could be a sketch. Anything you want to give me, I can work with.’ I wanted them to work as little as possible, so they wouldn’t feel overwhelmed and not want to do it. I said drums and voice would be the main ingredients. I asked their permission to reimagine the song completely.
“I didn’t want jazz people. I wanted people who write songs that aren’t what I’d normally do, conceptually, aesthetically, technically or compositionally. I grew up listening to rock, and one fun thing about this project has been to revisit my love for really big, well-produced music that is sonically satisfying, where you discover layers of keyboards, strings, synths, guitars, voices. Usually, even on these incredibly well-produced records, one drum part anchors the whole thing. I decided to use the drums as a production tool—to layer them like keyboards or guitars, and have different-sounding drum sets coming from different areas of the sonic spectrum.”
As an example, Sánchez referenced his treatment of “I Think We’re Past That Now” by Reznor, whom he’d met at the post-Birdman Golden Globe Award ceremonies. “Trent said he’d do something new for me,” Sánchez said. “He went into the studio with [Nine Inch Nails bandmate] Atticus Ross; a few weeks later, I had a Pro Tools session with a bunch of his voices and a few of Atticus’ synths. I started hearing this kind of industrial rock anthem. As I edited and layered his voices, I thought it would be great to have background vocals, which I did myself. And I recorded all the instruments—basses, guitars and, of course, a bunch of drums. Trent was surprised when he heard the track; I think he expected something Birdman-like, atmospheric drums on top of what he sent me. He said: ‘This is an actual tune. I haven’t stopped listening to it. I want to get you involved with my mixing engineer so we can extract maybe 15% more out of your mix.’”
To surprise the guest artists, “not making the song do the obvious thing that it seems the song wants to do” was a core intention. “I saw it as someone allowing me to perform plastic surgery on their baby,” Sánchez said. “A song is very personal; it touched me that they let me do my thing. Probably they thought I’d jazz it up a bit more. But that’s what I didn’t want to do—although my years as a jazz drummer and composer definitely influence and inform the album. I think SHIFT has a certain sensitivity and nuance that other rock or hip-hop albums don’t. I wanted to imprint that in this music, while staying truthful and loyal to the songs.”
Midway through our second conversation, perhaps to make me more comfortable after I’d lost my recorder, Sánchez related an experience that could serve as a textbook anxiety dream. He prefaced it with an account of his rocky first year at Berklee, where he matriculated in 1993. His mother (Ignacio López Tarso’s daughter), a highly educated, poorly paid film historian, critic, and public intellectual who raised Sánchez herself, maxed out her credit card for his tuition, then fell exponentially further into debt after a peso devaluation. Compounding matters, her car had been stolen and she’d broken up with her romantic partner.
Up north in Boston, Sánchez—broke, lonesome, overwhelmed with coursework—was concerned for his mother. During the first semester, as he played an arsenal of fancy licks on a “humongous” kit (22″ bass drum, seven cymbals and double bass pedal, to be precise) for a bebop ensemble on “Pent-Up House,” the instructor stripped his set in real time, leaving him with a hi-hat, bass drum, snare drum and ride cymbal. Then he admonished him to “solo in the form and trade choruses.” “Nobody wanted to play with me,” Sánchez recalled. On break in Mexico City, he told his mother he wanted to skip the next semester. She replied, “If you stay, I don’t think I’ll be able to help you go back a semester from now.”
Sánchez “reluctantly” returned to Boston. Immediately thereafter, he was “amazed” to receive Berklee’s biannual Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship, with a mandate to open the scholarship concert at New York’s Manhattan Center with a drum solo, witnessed by his idol, Rush’s Neil Peart, and a host of other “heroes,” who later “congratulated me and high-fived me and hugged me”—a dream come true. Other scholarships followed, and Sánchez “started to get little opportunities to play here and there.”
His first such opportunity (the story’s denouement) was a gig with a Polish singer “at a Polish convention center.” After setting up, Sánchez entered the bathroom to change into his rented, well-pressed tuxedo. “I start putting my shirt on, and the suit—and then all of a sudden, I’m like: ‘Where are the pants?’ It was the middle of summer and I was in shorts. I could not believe this was happening.” The singer told him to move the drum set to the corner, cover his legs, and not stand up for the whole gig, even to go to the bathroom. “I was like, ‘Yes, of course; whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it.’”
Perhaps Sánchez’s ups and downs during these formative years account for his kind, empathetic response to my calamity. But the anecdote also hints at the prodigious work ethic, keen intellect, deep focus, and raw talent that catapulted him to the pinnacle of jazz drumming over the ensuing decade.
Early on, Sánchez learned the drums playing along to his mother’s comprehensive collection of rock albums with “big, big sounds,” spanning Sgt. Pepper to Led Zeppelin, U2, Pink Floyd, and Peter Gabriel. “I also grew up listening to lots of Colombian and Cuban music—boleros, dancehalls that just play danzon and cha-chas and salsa, which I wouldn’t have heard in the States,” he says. “It was in the background. My grandfather listened to classical music at lunch when I was living with him. That was in my subconscious too.”
Jazz came into view after Sánchez saw Milos Forman’s Mozart biopic Amadeus. “I got obsessed with the idea of a genius child prodigy,” he says. “I thought, ‘I want to be like that; I want to feel I can do something special.’ I wanted to learn piano. I wanted to learn to write classical music.” In 1988, he enrolled in Mexico’s National Conservatory, where a friend gave him a cassette of the Chick Corea Elektric Band album Light Years, with Dave Weckl on drums.
“I’d never heard anything like it, so heavy and deep compared to rock & roll,” he says. “Immediately I felt something going on that I wanted to learn. I always liked improvising; even as a child I’d play for hours. Now I started naturally going more in the jazz direction without really knowing that’s what it was. I played Debussy, Satie, and Mozart, and analyzed scores—how Mozart wrote a symphony by developing just one motif. I didn’t realize until later that I could apply all the elements of motivic development—form, the use of space, repetition, extreme dynamics—to what I wanted to do. One of my favorite things is to do solos that can last from 10 minutes to one hour, using all these techniques to dig deep into the instrument’s storytelling aspect to keep the audience, and myself, engaged.”
Once at Berklee, Sánchez developed “impostor syndrome,” an affliction that kindled his desire to accurately render the various dialects he’d encounter as a working musician in the States. Toward the aim of “finding out why swing sounds the way it sounds,” he took lessons with and listened to iconic drummers recommended by the instructor who’d stripped his set. Via Berklee’s polyglot student body, Sánchez assimilated, with painstaking thoroughness, Afro-diasporic rhythms of Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Panama. “In Mexico, I’d played Latin music, but it was peripheral to me,” he says. “At Berklee, I met people who’d been doing this as kids. I studied congas, a little batá drums, timbales, bongos, different cowbells, to see where all those parts that Cuban drummers like Horacio Hernandez and Ignacio Berroa were playing come from.”
As Sánchez absorbed the various beats, he evolved his own musical poetics. “I developed what I used to call ‘extreme independence,’ where one limb did the clave, while at the top I played different claves at different time signatures and different tempos,” he recalls. “It was fun. I did it because I wanted to play that music really well. Same thing with Brazilian music. I felt I had a thick accent playing all these different musics and, just as I wanted to get rid of my accent when speaking English, I wanted to lose my accent—rock-fusion, or whatever that accent was—when I was playing jazz or Latin or anything else.”
Michael League, who is producing a forthcoming album on which Sánchez and conguero/singer Pedrito Martínez improvise and dialogue on various Afro-Cuban-Yoruban themes, opines that Sánchez transcended that aspiration. “When I’m teaching or engaging with music students outside the United States, Antonio, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin are the first examples that I give of people who did not grow up in the culture that birthed the music they’re known for playing, and yet have been able to completely embed themselves in that musical culture, and not only contribute to it with authenticity and fluidity, but actually create space for their own voice,” League says. “That’s why people call them. To me, Antonio is the textbook of the way to do it.”
The morning after our second conversation, Sánchez would join bassist Linda May Han Oh and pianist Gwilym Simcock—his bandmates on Pat Metheny’s 2020 CD From This Time (Nonesuch)—at a Manhattan rehearsal studio to prepare for a three-week Southern Hemisphere tour to cover COVID-canceled bookings (originally scheduled for March 2020) in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Lima, Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. From This Time is Sánchez’s ninth album with Metheny since 2002; among the others are two Grammy-winners with the Pat Metheny Group, another two in Metheny’s trio with Christian McBride, and another two with Metheny’s Unity Band.
Each album showcases Sánchez’s propensity, as League puts it, “for interacting without in any way compromising the groove.” “First, you have to learn Pat’s language, which is completely informed by jazz and bebop,” Sánchez said. “But you’re not playing jazz and bebop. The interaction is totally based on jazz, but the delivery is different. A lot of it, especially the Pat Metheny Group, is very straight eighth-note-based. I think he felt comfortable with me because I came more from straight eighth-note playing than from swing. Once we’d played a staggering number of gigs for years and years, he decided I was ready to make my own decisions within his framework.”
Sánchez credits Metheny’s 68-minute epic The Way Up (2005), on which he played, as a strong influence on the “long-form storytelling” compositions for his own Meridian Suite (CAM Jazz, 2014)—in the program notes Sánchez compared it to a “musical novel,” with compositions developing “the way a novelist develops a story and its characters”—and Lines in the Sand (CAM Jazz, 2019). Rather than mirror the particulars of Metheny’s vocabulary, Sánchez borrows from his aesthetic, creating strong melodies from complex ideas and contextualizing them within an epic narrative frame.
Because of his mother’s profession, Sánchez became a moviegoer as a young child. His grandfather, now 97, appeared in 50 films, more than 100 theatrical productions, and several dozen telenovelas and TV series. So it’s no surprise that Sánchez imparts to the aforementioned albums—and his pieces on Trio Grande (Whirlwind, 2020), a lovely collaborative date with Will Vinson and Gilad Hekselman—the sensibility of an imaginary soundtrack. His background also informs Sánchez’s uncanny signifying on the passages in Birdman that depict the mental breakdown of Michael Keaton’s sometimes pantsless Birdman character.
“It’s a tribute to Iñárritu that Antonio’s voice and the color of the drums and where it sits in the soundscape of the movie is something that he wanted,” says Vince Mendoza, who arranged and orchestrated eight Sánchez pieces with the WDR Orchestra and the composer on drums on Channels of Energy (CAM Jazz, 2018). “It’s also a tribute to Iñárritu that he’s speaking a different language of music inside his narrative than most filmmakers ever thought about doing. I mean, what music do you hear when you hear heartbreak or struggle or humor or anger? This was a different language to express that narrative.” Mendoza added that for his recent Freedom Over Everything, a long suite for symphonic orchestra and rhythm section, he wanted Sánchez for his ability “to drive the bus, but with great poetry and a sense of color and emotion in a way we don’t really expect a big-band drummer to contribute.”
“I improvised the original demos for Birdman off the script according to what Iñárritu explained to me before they started shooting,” Sánchez says. “He brought the demos to the set to rehearse with. He told me the drums sounded too clean. I always pride myself, of course, on having my drums sound great and well-tuned, but he wanted me to dirty it up. ‘I want the drums to sound like they’ve been in storage for 50 years, because it happens in the bowels of an old Broadway theater,’ he said. ‘How can we make the drums sound that way?’ I started putting T-shirts on the drums and detuning them purposely, stacking cymbals on top of cymbals to make them sound trashy, like somebody throwing the drums down a set of stairs. It ended up an organic, flow-like way of playing.
“The first Bad Hombre was a continuation of ‘What can I do with the drum set as the main instrument?’—but because the drums were overlapping with all the electronics and technology and click tracks, I had to tighten things up. With the evolution to SHIFT, where the songs are not mine, I tried to be free of preconceptions and stylistic boundaries, and play what I hear nowadays. It’s a very interesting progression for me in terms of the instrument itself.”
Directly after returning to New York from his September-October sojourn with Metheny, Sánchez—and Alexa—would embark on a lengthy tour with Bad Hombres y Mujeres behind SHIFT, which, as of this writing, has some 400,000 Spotify hits. I asked if he approaches this music with a different mindset than he brings to Metheny’s.
“SHIFT is completely different from any gig I’ve done,” Sánchez says. “For one thing, I play to a click track. On Saturday in Detroit, I played with Donny McCaslin; it was a blast, so open—I could do whatever I wanted. Now, going out with Pat, I’ll have to switch my whole thing again, though I know it will come out naturally because I’ve done it so much with him. A good sideman drummer has to be able literally to switch hats, depending on the situation. And then, on my own gig, I have to switch hats radically from when I’m playing with other people. I feel my responsibility is to keep making things happen, which sometimes makes you force things, not relax and let the music flow where it needs to flow. The adrenalin is different, the anxiety is different. Everything changes. That’s a constant challenge that I struggle with.”
Both Alexa and League—who booked Bad Hombres y Mujeres to play his GroundUp festival in Miami last May—feel that Sánchez’s SHIFT hat is a beautiful fit. “Antonio has kept the integrity of the original songs, but elevated them with the production,” Alexa said. “Then, in the live performance, he doesn’t want us to copy what’s on the record. Through the four of us, we’ve figured out ways to open the songs and expand them in the live setting. Everybody is featured. We’re each allowed to bring to the table what we do as artists.”
While acknowledging the individuality of the protagonists, League adds that, to his ears, the band projects “a feeling of anonymity that you also feel when you hear a rock band, where it’s like a wall of sound that’s created by, yes, individuals, but individuals who are not thinking about featuring themselves. They are committed 100% to the musical content within the songs. Everyone on that stage is an all-star, but none of them play like it. It’s like a dream team where no one plays hero ball, everyone’s passing all the time, and they’re working together.”
Which is precisely Sánchez’s intention. “At the end of the day, I want the show to be about the songs,” he said. “Solos should be in the service of the songs, not like a jazz gig where the melody is an excuse to explore all the possibilities. We’re not playing jazz, but at the same time it’s completely informed by jazz. To me, jazz today is not really about the sound of jazz. It’s freedom. It’s given me a harmonic and rhythmic prowess that I can now apply to anything.
“I consider ‘Bad Hombre’ an alter ego that allows me total freedom to do whatever I want, go wherever I feel. It’s genre-bending, exploring sonorities, exploring styles. I’m not thinking I want this record to be this or that. It just kind of happens—the alter ego allows things to flow. It’s informed by jazz, by rock, by fusion, by electronic music, by world music. Of course, I knew some jazz purists would be completely ticked off. But usually that means you’re moving forward. And I like moving forward.”
Today Is The Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics and the Arts 