Latin Jazz Expert to Perform at Wesleyan Jazz Weekend

When Bobby Sanabria was 12 years old, he saw an outdoor concert by bandleader and timbale player Tito Puente in his neighborhood at East 153rd Street that changed his life. “That’s when I knew,” he said. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

More than 50 years later, the impacts of that life-changing moment continue to reverberate as Sanabria brings his signature talents as a drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, and educator to campus for the 22nd annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend on April 26. The performance will be the Connecticut debut of his ensemble Ascensión and the culmination of April’s Jazz Appreciation Month.

According to Professor of Music and African American Studies Jay Hoggard ’76, MA ’91, Sanabria has emerged as a major figure and one of the leaders of the Latin jazz vocabulary. “He’s a historian and a great practitioner and bandleader, and he’s played with everybody,” Hoggard said. “He’s an expert.”

Jazz Appreciation Month was created by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001 to recognize and celebrate the genre’s heritage and history. “Jazz music is important because it represents a deep cultural manifestation in an art format that speaks very much to the history of the United States, and the future of the United States,” Hoggard said.

“If you don’t know the history of your art form, you’re not really knowledgeable as an artist,” Sanabria said, regardless of genre. “Everything has a history.”

Sanabria said the initial concept for Ascensión started in high school and later took shape as a sextet while he was a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1977. The ensemble takes a Pan-Latino approach to Latin jazz, going beyond Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythms, exploring the African diaspora traditions from Venezuela, Colombia, and Sanabria’s ancestral homeland of Puerto Rico, all framed by jazz arrangements. “Latin America is incredible in terms of its scope of the different styles of music that are available to us and that we can draw upon for inspiration,” Sanabria said.

Born and raised in the South Bronx, Sanabria now lives in the Morris Park neighborhood. For Sanabria, Latin music—and salsa in particular—is the engine that drives New York City, and he is a product of that environment. When he was 11 years old, Sanabria struck up the courage to play the cowbell with some local rumberos playing Cuban guaguancó music in the park, which started his journey of learning the battery of percussion used in salsa—congas, timbales, and bongó. Before he had an instrument, Sanabria would practice the conga rhythms on the wall tiles of the shower in his family’s bathroom or imitate the cáscara rhythm of a rumba with a plastic comb and a metal car bumper with friends. “The drummer and percussionist that I am comes from the streets of New York City, specifically the South Bronx,” Sanabria said. “I’m so lucky that I grew up in New York. The best teacher is going and seeing masters, or people that know more than you, and you check out what they’re doing.”

As a college sophomore, Sanabria asked to sit in with Puente for the last tune of a concert at The Harbor House in Lynn, Massachusetts, trading four bars of improvisation on the timbales during a descarga (a two-chord improvised Cuban jam based on the mambo). “That’s how we became friends,” Sanabria said. He later played drumset in Puente’s band, and Puente was a special guest on Ascensión’s debut album “¡New York City Aché!” in 1993.

“He’s the greatest musician in the history of Latin music,” Sanabria said of Puente. “He’s just a bad cat. He was a symbol of excellence for us in the Puerto Rican community. A complete musician.” Sanabria’s other early influences included Buddy Rich and Billy Cobham. Sanabria’s Multiverse Big Band has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards, and has recorded music by composers ranging from Puente and trumpeter Don Ellis to Frank Zappa and Steely Dan.

At Berklee, Sanabria auditioned for Gary Burton, performed in Michael Gibbs’ Chrome Waterfall Orchestra alongside fellow students Bill Frisell on guitar and Kermit Driscoll on bass, and studied jazz drumset with Keith Copeland, in addition to classical percussion. “Keith was the one that showed me that the roots of everything that we do in popular American music rhythmically is based in the clave rhythm,” Sanabria said of the foundational Afro-Cuban rhythmic pattern that has its roots in West and Central Africa.

Sanabria was the drummer for the “father of Afro-Cuban jazz,” maestro Mario Bauzá, for nine years. Dizzy Gillespie would often sit in or be featured as a guest soloist with Bauzá’s band on trumpet. At one rehearsal, Gillespie brought the original 1948 sheet music for the tune “Manteca.” Bauzá first exposed Gillespie to Afro-Cuban music in 1938 when they were members of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. “They were really scientists, really intellectuals on the level of Albert Einstein,” Sanabria said of Puente and Gillespie. “But with a unique sense of humor as well.”

Hoggard has known Sanabria since the late 1970s when both musicians were living in New York, initially meeting through their work with saxophonist and flute player Henry Threadgill.

Sanabria teaches at The New School, leading their Afro-Cuban Ensemble and Orchestra, where he met fellow drummer and vibraphone player Joe Chambers, who asked Sanabria to play drumset, percussion, and congas on two of his albums. Chambers later recommended Sanabria to Warren Smith to join the percussion ensemble M’Boom, which was originally founded by Max Roach Hon. ’85, P’93. Hoggard and Sanabria performed together in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park in August 2024 at a centennial tribute to Roach.

“You never know who’s listening, you never know who you’re affecting,” Sanabria said. “But if you’re out there doing what you’re doing and it’s positive, it’s affecting somebody. And that’s a good thing.”

The Ascensión concert at Wesleyan will take place on Saturday, April 26 at 7:00 p.m. It will open with a 45-minute set performed by members of the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra, directed by Hoggard. The Wesleyan student jazz ensembles will also perform their own concert on Friday, April 25.