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Antonio Sanchez and Migration

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Growing up in Mexico City, drummer Antonio Sanchez was a rocker who trained himself by playing along to his mom’s Beatles, Stones and Led Zeppelin records. While expanding his music horizons studying classical piano at that city’s music conservatory, classmates turned him on to jazz — a Chick Corea record did the trick.

Before long he was on his way to the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New England Conservatory. When he caught the ear of Latin jazz giants Danilo Pérez and Paquito D’Rivera, as he put it, “It started snowballing [into] playing with David Sanchez and Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, Gary Burton, all these people that I play with today because they heard me with someone else and liked what they heard.”

Several Grammys later, Sanchez decided to assemble Migration, a band that would play music he’d been writing. Calling from his home in New York City where he was making last minute preparations for a West Coast tour, he talked of what it takes to be a bandleader. “I’ve been a sideman for such a long time, but I’ve been around bandleaders pretty much all my life, so I know it’s a very hard and very taxing on somebody to lead an ensemble, to write music for it, to get gigs, to pay everybody. It’s a hard job. I knew it would be hard, but I had some music that I wanted to play and I really felt I had something to offer as a bandleader. So I put this band together that was basically two saxophones, bass and drums. It’s a peculiar formation because you don’t have piano or guitar to provide chords — it has a very different color when you have all that space. So I wrote songs for that ensemble and it’s been a lot of fun.”

While it takes a lot of trust to turn his tunes over to other players, he feels secure doing so. “We’re all musical kindred spirits in a way,” he said. “We all share the same musical values and musical views and concepts. When I called the guys who are playing with me — Donny McCaslinand Dave Binney play saxophone and Scott Colley plays a bass — well, I’ve been playing with them on and off for many years. I’ve played in their bands actually. So it’s a healthy musical relationship.”

How does he lead from behind the drum kit? “Since it’s my music, I feel like I have more authority to shape the music dynamically in term of: you’re going to play soft, you’re going to play loud, play slow, play faster. I can control those nuances that make the music sound one way or another… But I don’t want it to seem like I’m the bandleader — I just want it to be like, that’s a band playing music — maybe you don’t know who the bandleader is because everybody has an equal share in the ensemble.”

He concedes that it’s not easy making a living as a musician in this day and age, particularly playing jazz in the States. As a result, he works more in Europe than back home. He figures the problem is twofold.

“It’s the mentality of the United States right now,” he said. “I think they’re so drugged by TV and by the Internet, that I don’t think they want to go out that much. I don’t want to generalize, but there’s a problem. And why would you go out to hear music that you’ve never heard on the radio or on TV? How are you going to get to know somebody if you never hear their name mentioned anywhere? Why do you buy a record? Because you’ve listened to it somewhere else, on the radio or maybe someone plays it for you. Then you get to the record store, there are thousands of jazz records and you’ve never heard them. You have heard nothing, so what are you going to get?”

Well, you might want to try the Migration album, or if you can wait a few months, Antonio Sanchez Live in New York, the double disc package he’ll have out this summer.

In the meantime you canhear Antonio Sanchez and Migration when the Redwood Jazz Alliance concludes its current season with a concert by the band in HSU’s Kate Buchanan Room on Thursday, April 1 at 8 p.m. Sanchez and company will also host a free public workshop that afternoon at 5 p.m. in HSU’s Studio Theatre. Concert tickets are $15, $10 for students and seniors, and can be purchased online at www.redwoodjazzalliance.org or at your favorite local independent record store.

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