Bio:
Born in Mexico City, 5 time Grammy Award winner Antonio Sanchez began playing the drums at age five and performed professionally in his early teens in Mexico’s rock, jazz and latin scenes.
He pursued a degree in classical piano at the National Conservatory in Mexico and in 1993 enrolled in Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in Jazz Studies.
Since moving to New York City in 1999, Antonio has become one of the most sought-after drummers in the international jazz scene. Following 18 years and 9 albums as one of the most revered collaborators with guitarist/composer Pat Metheny, he also has recorded and performed with many other most prominent artists like Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden and Toots Thielmans.
In 2014 Sanchez’s popularity soared when he scored Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) which ended up fetching 4 Academy awards (including best picture) and for which Antonio won a Grammy award. Additional film/tv projects include EPIX network's Get Shorty and Hippopotamus among others.
Sanchez currently has close to a dozen recordings as a leader and solo artist. His recent projects to date include the critically acclaimed, through-composed epic The Meridian Suite, the star studded album Three Times Three, Grammy nominated Bad Hombre —a sociopolitical electronica & drums exploration, Channels of Energy, an ambitious project with the WDR Big Band with arrangements of his works by Vince Mendoza and the most recent 2019 release, Lines in the Sand with his band Migration. Here Sanchez turns his political anger into a moving musical statement of epic compositional proportions as much a protest against injustice in our current political climate and as a tribute to every immigrant’s journey.
To date Antonio has been awarded 5 Grammys, nominations for Golden Globe & Bafta Awards, wins for the World Soundtrack New Artist Discovery and Best Original Film Score Award, 3 Echo Awards (Germany), Hollywood Music in Media Award, the Critics’ Choice Movie Award and 3 Modern Drummer’s Jazz Drummer of the Year, among many other wins and nominations. He has been the featured cover artist for DownBeat, JazzTimes, JAZZIZ, Modern Drummer (twice), Drum!, Musico Pro and Drumhead among others.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
"I got together a lot with Antonio wondering if he was the guy. I finally realized that he'd be able to meet the standard for this gig. Very quickly, he took things to another place - a very personal and exciting place for the audience....It is thrilling to get on the bandstand with him every night. You just can't wait to play with him."
- Pat Metheny
"Antonio Sanchez is one of the most respected drummers working today. Sanchez transcends genre with the ability to literally play and adapt to any situation with virtually any ensemble."
- Critical Jazz
“Mr. Sanchez emerged as one of the standout jazz drummers on the contemporary scene, a polyrhythmic ace attuned to the subtlest dynamic fluctuations”
- The New York Times
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).