Conga don Poncho Sanchez pays tribute to masters

Even as a teenager growing up in the early days of rock and roll, Poncho Sanchez was much more in tune with the sounds of Latin jazz than The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or anything else his peers were listening to.

"I remember when the Latin rock music came in — Santana, El Chicano, Malo — and I never was a big fan of that music either," Sanchez says from his home in Southern California. "I remember when Santana recorded 'Oye Como Va' (a song by salsa legend Tito Puente that the rock band covered in 1970). One of my friends got excited because he thought I was going to get excited because he had a brand new album with this brand new song by Carlos Santana. ... He put it on for me, and I went: 'That's not Carlos Santana's music. That's Tito Puente's music.'"

More than 40 years later, the 60-year-old Sanchez is considered to be perhaps the leading Latin jazz musician of his day. The acclaimed Mexican-American singer, conga player, composer and bandleader, who performs Sunday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, has recorded 25 albums and won a Grammy in 2000. But on his latest album, he once again draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of Latin jazz to pay tribute to two of the music's founders.

Produced by Sanchez and his longtime trombonist, Francisco Torres, Chano y Dizzy! features 11 songs by the unlikely team of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo. When Gillespie, an African-American jazz trumpeter best know for innovating be-bop with Charlie Parker, and Pozo, a Cuban-born conguero and composer, first met in 1947, the two couldn't even speak to each other because of the language barrier. But in one prolific and tragically short year -- Pozo was killed in a bar fight in 1948 at age 33 -- the pair formed the basic language of Latin jazz.

"I've recorded a lot of their tunes on a lot of different records in many different settings in many different ways," Sanchez says of the origins of the project, which was suggested by his manager. "But I started digging through my library, and I pulled some stuff we had never recorded before that a lot of people might not have heard."

Tunes like the bop-influenced "Groovin' High" and the torrid album closer "Ariñañara," a song written by Pozo before his arrival in America.

For the record, Sanchez and his band recruited award-winning New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard to play the part of Gillespie. Blanchard was originally scheduled to appear with the band in Germantown, but a scheduling conflict forced his cancelation earlier this week. He is replaced by another New Orleans trumpeter, Christian Scott, a 29-year-old nephew of saxophonist Donald Harrison who is an award-winning young star in his own right.

Sanchez's love affair with the music of Dizzy and Chano goes back to his youth. Born in Texas but raised in Norwalk, Calif., Sanchez is the youngest of 11 children and the only musician. The music got him through his siblings, whom he would watch as they danced to TV music programs like "American Bandstand" and "The Johnny Otis Show."

"I was just a little boy, and so I would watch them do that every day," he recalls. "I loved the sound of the music they played."

Sanchez started playing music on guitar, taking lessons from a guitarist in the neighborhood with a couple of other kids. When the family moved back to Texas briefly when he was in junior high school, Sanchez worked as hard as he could on the instrument. When the family returned to California, Sanchez looked up his old playing buddies from the neighborhood to find they had gotten much better than him and had started a band.

"I hid that thing," says Sanchez, laughing, referring to his guitar. "They said, 'Poncho, we don't need a guitar player. What we need is a singer.' They said do you want to try, and I just wanted to be in the band. I did the best imitation of James Brown I could think of. ... It's funny I was the lead vocalist of the band for four years and I've been the lead vocalist of every band I've ever been in since and it all started by accident."

In high school, after learning flute and various forms of percussion, Sanchez discovered his true instrument in the congas.

"I just like the way they sounded," he says of following in the footsteps of conguero bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria. "I like the way it felt on my hands."

In 1975, Sanchez got his big break joining his idol Tjader's band. Shortly before his death seven years later, Tjader helped his protégé get his own record deal with the Concord Picante label, for which Sanchez has recorded ever since.

Poncho Sanchez with Christian Scott

7 p.m. Sunday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, 1801 Exeter. Tickets: $25, $35, and $45, available at the box office, by phone at (901) 751-7500 and online at