Latin Jazz artists that spend a lifetime in the music world need to diversify their repertoire over time. In the early days of their musical journey, they spend their time solidifying the details of a specific musical genre; their output benefits from a single focus. They build their reputation upon this musical specialty and they become closely identified with it. As they follow this path into the long term, they run the risk of becoming stagnant and falling into redundant musical patterns. They need to experiment with new musical ideas, perform with different musicians, and stretch the limits of their musicality. These new challenges keep the musicians fresh, force them to maintain an active engagement in the music, and regularly peek their listeners’ interest. At the same time, they need to stay connected to their roots and constantly examine the relationship between their new ideas and their original focus. Over time, the musician evolves into a new artistic personality with a distinct approach to the music that includes all the elements of their musical explorations.

With the 2009 release of Psychedelic Blues, conguero Poncho Sanchez looks back on well over three decades as a professional musician. His initial leap into the life of a full time professional musician took him deep into the Latin Jazz world, performing as a sideman to Cal Tjader. This allowed Sanchez to build upon his passion for the genre that he developed as a young musician. Once Sanchez moved into the position of band leader, he understood the style with a keen insight that allowed him to carry his group into the front of the genre. The Poncho Sanchez Band became known for its tight rhythm section work and solid Latin Jazz sound, but Sanchez recognized the need for change. With the release of the 2003 album Out Of Sight, Sanchez introduced a new line-up of musicians and steered his Latin Jazz approach in a distinctly new direction. Over the course of the next few albums, Sanchez integrated soul and rhythm and blues into Latin rhythms, creating a funky mixture that hit a chord with a popular audience. The band’s success grew tremendously, making them worldwide ambassadors to the Latin Jazz world. With the arrival of Psychedelic Blues, Sanchez emerges as a creative and defined bandleader that always delivers top-notch danceable Latin Jazz.

In the last piece of our interview with Poncho Sanchez, we dig into the musical changes that led to the definition of his current sound. Don’t forget to check out the back story of Sanchez’s career - Part 1 of our interview explores Sanchez’s early musical development, Part 2 looks at his leap into Latin percussion and gig with Cal Tjader, and Part 3 discusses the early days of the Poncho Sanchez Band. Today’s feature takes us into 2009, where we look at Psychedelic Blues and more. Enjoy!

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LATIN JAZZ CORNER: You did a series of albums from 2003 – 2005 that started with Out Of Sight, where you went in an R ‘n B/soul direction. There were some changes in the band line-up as well. What inspired you to make both those musical and personnel changes?

PONCHO SANCHEZ: A couple of the guys in the band that had been with me for a very long time started complaining a bit. They were saying that we should be doing this or we should be doing that . . . Everyone’s got there opinion, right? You’ve got nine guys and they’re all voicing their opinions. I’d say, “We’ll we’ve got to do this because it’s a Latin Jazz band . . .” Someone else would say, “Well, we should be doing more bebop.” Then another guy would say, “We should be doing more salsa.” I’d say, “We’re not a bebop band. We’re not really a salsa band either.” We do a little bit of both, and when we perform in places, people like us to play Latin Jazz and salsa. I hadn’t really bought into the soul thing yet. We had recorded one or two soul things before – James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and we had recorded “Let A Woman Be A Women And Let A Man Be A Man.” We’d put them in every once in a while, but they weren’t really a big selling point in our shows at that time. So I would say, “Well, everyone’s got their ideas . . .”

We were playing a lot and flying here and flying there; we had some outrageous flight times - red eyes and all that stuff. Thank god we were young. Some of the guys were saying, “Hey, we should be getting better flights. Hey, we should be flying first class. Hey, we should be staying in the best hotels.” I would say, “I agree with you! I want to fly first class and I want to stay at the Four Seasons. I want the best places too. But hey man, we’re a Latin Jazz band. How are you going to fly first class? How are you going to have all the best? It’s not going to work, we can’t afford that. We’re a Latin Jazz band.”

Finally, I said, that’s it. What are we going to do? After about four or five years of that going around and around and around, some guys were doing the gig but complaining. So I said, “Hey, it’s all good. We’ve been together a long time, and maybe it is time to make some changes.” It was tough, because everybody was family. I still love the guys today that left, but we decided to make some changes. They went on their way and I said, “You know what I’m going to do? I’d going to get some young guys in the band. Younger than me, because all the other guys were about my age – get some young blood in here.” So I got some young cats – George Ortiz on timbales . . . we made some changes here and there. That was cool, we started doing some different things like that and changing things around with some young blood in the band. It was a little tough to take off with at first because the young guys were really nervous and they were just excited to be in my band. They grew up watching the other guys in my band. Everybody respected each other, which was very cool actually. A couple of months later though, they caught on and we were flying, we were doing it.

Then I said, “I think that I’m going to go back and see if I can mix in that soul bag a little heavier.” The people kind of liked it. We’d play the James Brown thing sometimes, and people would ask for it every once in a while. So I started leaning more towards that. I knew Fred Wesley - we had played together years before in The Long Beach City Band, a big band here in Long Beach, California. I said, “You know, I think I’ll call Fred Wesley and see if he wants to do a little James Brown number or something.” I called him and he said, “Well, why don’t we get Pee Wee and Maceo Parker – the three James Brown horn players?” I said, “Yea, man, let’s do it!” Maceo Parker was in Europe in time; he wanted to do it, but he couldn’t get back in time to do the recording. So I just used Pee Wee and Fred Wesley (on the recording Out Of Sight)– later on I was able to use Maceo Parker on another record (Raise Your Hand). But I did finally use all the horn players from the James Brown Band.

We started doing those records like that; we did another record with a James Brown theme and then we invited Ray Charles to play on it, and Billy Preston – people like that. I sang with Sam Moore from Sam and Dave . . . it was all these guys I grew up listening to when I was in high school! For me, it was like a dream come true to have these great cats playing with us. Then I used the whole Tower of Power band on another record and Hugh Masekela from South Africa (on the album Do It!). All these ideas were flowing – a lot of these different things started happening when I got the new guys in the band. We started doing some fresh new ideas, and it was good, things went very well for us. Everything went up another notch and things were happening pretty good for us. We got nominated for another Grammy with Poncho at Montreux, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2005 – it was a CD and a DVD. So, you know, we had all these new guys in the band . . . how do you say it? The thing keeps going, the story keeps growing. Now I’m bringing in new younger family members, it helps them grow.

I think that I’ve done my part pretty good, and now we’re just continuing the cycle. I’ve got Arturo Sandoval on the new CD, and I’ve got a young guitar player from L.A., Andrew Synowiec; he played on about four or five tunes. A nice, young guitar player; he’s a really nice guy and great musician. He can read anything; you put anything out there, he reads it right away – I love that! You play it once or twice and that guy’s got it!

LJC: He sounds great on the new album!

PS: Yea, he’s smooth as silk. He’s a great guy too - that makes it so much better. He’s not the show-off, smart alec kind of guy. He’s a nice kid, and he plays great – he can play jazz, and he’s learning all about Latin Jazz now. He grabs it pretty quick. I gave him a bunch of CDs with old recordings of guys playing tres – Niño Rivera and the old Patato records with tres on it. All the old Cuban stuff and the old cuatro stuff from Puerto Rico. I gave him all that guitar stuff; whenever I see him in his car nowadays, he’s always listening to all of that. He’s learning about the Latin playing.

LJC: The new album is so great, it’s one of my favorites that I’ve heard from you band in a while. It really is a jump back to that straight-ahead Latin Jazz approach – was that something you were looking for?

PS: Yea, John Burke, the vice-president of Concord Records, Francisco Torres, David Torres, and I all got together before we did this and discussed which way should we go, what should we do? John Burke said, “Poncho, why do you go back to what made this band popular and famous – the Latin Jazz stuff. Why don’t you lean back into that stuff and see what you want to do. You’ve always got great ideas for tunes that people haven’t recorded in years – you guys redo it, revamp it, and it comes out great.” So I told him, “Yea, let’s do it, I’m good with that.” We were here at my house. I’m a collector, so I’ve got a room with 6,000 – 7,000 CDs, about 5,000 records – some collector’s stuff that you can never find – and I’ve got about 3,000 DVDs and video tapes of everybody from Dizzy Gillespie to whatever – stuff from Cuba, I’ve got it all. Old doo-wop, rhythm and blues, James Brown in old black and white footage of his band, I’ve got a lot of stuff. So there we go, we start pulling out ideas.

I said, you know, I’ve always like that Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers tune “Slowly But Surely” – man, nobody’s recorded that tune and that’s a great number. It’s a jazz tune – straight ahead swing, but I said, but we’ve got to put that Latin style in there. So Francisco Torres says, “Hey, Poncho, that would work as a cha cha cha. Let’s try it.” So we start trying it like that, and it lent itself to it. Then he came up with a nice arrangement of that. I told him, I also like the Horace Silver tune “Silver’s Serenade,” and that’s just a medium tempo swing tune. Well, we do it as an uptempo mambo. So that’s what we do, we start picking ideas about tunes that I always liked and jazz stuff that I love. Then, of course, we all wrote some tunes, you know, everybody’s got to get an original on there. Also, John Burke said, “Why don’t you do a tribute to Willie Bobo?” So I said, “OK” and we did a Willie Bobo medley. The song that not many people know is, “Baby, I Don’t Know” – the one that I sing. And then we did “Fried Neckbones And Some Home Fries” and “Spanish Grease” which are the two most popular tunes from Willie Bobo. David Torres did a really nice job in putting those three tunes together.

And then we recorded the song “Con Sabor Latino” – that song comes from an album by Rene Touzet and His Orchestra. Rene Touzet was a piano player from Cuba who moved to Los Angeles in the fifties. He recorded an album in the early sixties called Too Much!. It’s an album – definitely not on CD! The song was called “Con Sabor Latino.” He did that for a disc jockey in Los Angeles by the name of Chico Sesma. Chico Sesma is still alive today, Rene Touzet has passed already. Chico Sesma had the first – and only – Latin Jazz or salsa program in the late fifties or early sixties on the AM dial – not FM. He used to come on for one hour, once a week. When I was a little boy back in 1959, my sisters used to wait for his program to come on, because he’d play all the music of Tito Puente, Machito, and Cal Tjader – all that stuff. His theme song was called “Con Sabor Latino” – that was it, that’s the song! He would have that as his theme song and he would lower it down in the middle and say, “Hi, this is Chico Sesma and it’s my pleasure to be your host for the best in mambo and cha cha cha music” The song goes, “A pleasure to be your host . . .” that’s when he would lower it down. This was a long time ago – I was a kid. That’s where that song comes from, and nobody had touched that song since those days.

About three years ago, Ry Cooder and Little Wille G, a singer from a band called The Midnighters from East L.A. that did a lot of oldies in the sixties and seventies – they came to my house and Ry said, “Poncho, we’ve got a little bit of a budget to do a record . . .” The record that he was going to put together – you know, he always has trippy ideas – he was going to put out a record in all the Starbuck’s with music from the sixties in Los Angeles. From Doo Wop, oldies, soul, Latin . . . everything – they were going to cover all the bases. They wanted me to record a song that had something to do with Latin bands in the sixties in Los Angeles. So I thought of that tune, “Con Sabor Latino.” I played it for him, and he loved it! He said, “Oh, Poncho, that would be great!” This was three years ago, and we were going to record that song for this package with Ry Cooder. Well, they were trying to get the money together, make a budget, and make a recording with all these different groups. It never happened. He called back and said, “You know Poncho, I thought I had it, but they don’t want to spend that much money.” So it fell apart. I said, “Well, OK, maybe some other time. If something comes up, let me know, we can try it again. No problem” So when this record was coming out, I said, “Hey, why don’t we try that Con Sabor Latino idea again?” So Francisco Torres said, “Let me hear it” – he had never heard it. I put it on and he said, “That’s cool man, that’s old style! Let’s do it!” And boom, there it is, I decided to use it on this record. So these are just a lot of ideas that I’ve had for a while.

LJC: It’s really interesting to hear you talk about these great role models that you had like Cal, Mongo, and Tito – because you’ve really become one of those people in the Latin Jazz world. I don’t think any Latin Jazz group travels as much as you do and puts the music out there. How do you feel about your role in that?

PS: Thank you very much for that. Really, I try to be as humble as possible, because being a big shot really gets you nowhere. I’m not about that. I don’t like people that act like that either, because, we’re all the same. We’ll all just folks – that’s the way that I see it, we’re all just people. I’ve been blessed. I’ve been lucky . . . everything’s worked for me – luck, hard work, studying, you know, I’ve done it all. So at the end, I guess I’ve been pretty lucky, because I’m still here and I’m doing it.

But it’s funny you say that. Yesterday I went to a place that has nothing to do with Latin Jazz – I went to my son’s work. It’s a government run place, you’ve got to have a card to slide and a code to get in. I went there just because my son works there – he said, “Dad, they’re going to have a Latin month here at my work and they’re going to have different speakers come that have been through different trials and tribulations in there lives. These people at my work want to hear their stories. One of the guys plays congas and he knows who you are – do you think that you could come and do a talk?” I said, “Of course, what do you want me to do?” Usually it goes through my management, but I told my manager, “This is my son’s work, I’m going for free.” I went there yesterday and to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable – it wasn’t a gig! I waited for my son on the other side of the gate and he checked me in, we had to go through a security guy, he gave me a badge, and I was getting kind of nervous. It’s a different world.

We got into this big conference room, really nice room that held about ninety people. My son was saying, “Boy, I hope that people show up! I think a lot of people know who you are, but I’m not sure.” People started coming in, saying, “Wow, it really is him! This is your Dad?!?” Once they started coming in, it was packed! As a matter of fact, the guy that does that every year said that was the most people that they’d ever had there. People were standing in the hallway! They showed a twelve minute version of a DVD called “The Keeper Of The Flame – Poncho Sanchez” – it’s a documentary that lasts about an hour, but we have a twelve minute version of it. They showed that first, and people clapped their hands like they were at the movies or something. Then I got up and spoke; after I spoke, they gave me a standing ovation for a couple of minutes. Individuals were coming up to me saying that my experiences reminded them of when they were young; I touched people’s hearts I guess with the stories that I tell, because they’re real, true stories. People wanted to take pictures with me and get autographs! I still kind of have a hard time with that, because, you know, to me, the greatest guys are Mongo and Cal Tjader – not me. They’re the guys, I still have that much respect for them; they’re the main guys in my life still. But people were telling me just what you were telling me – “No Poncho, now you’re those guys!” I guess it comes with the territory. I’m just the guy down the street, that’s how I feel. But I’m thankful that I’m still here doing it. I’m still healthy enough to hit that damn drum!

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A big thanks to Poncho for spending so much time talking with me and for spending so many years creating incredible Latin Jazz!

Make sure that you check out Part 1 of the LJC interview with Poncho Sanchez and read some background on Sanchez’s early days. You can find it HERE.

You’re also going to want to read Part 2 of the LJC interview with Poncho Sanchez, where you’ll hear about his first steps into Latin percussion and his gig with Cal Tjader. You can find it HERE.

Don’t forget Part 3 of the LJC interview with Poncho Sanchez where we dive into the early days of the Poncho Sanchez Band and discuss some of the group’s incredible guest artists and special projects. You can find it HERE

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Check Out These Related Posts:
8 Cal Tjader Albums To Kickstart Your Latin Jazz Record Collection
Latin Jazz Standards: 10 Versions Of Manteca
Latin Jazz At The San Jose Jazz Festival: The Festival Within A Festival
Supporting A Growing Latin Jazz Scene: The Jazz Institute Of Chicago

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