Antonio Sanchez Talks About His New Album, ‘Bad Hombre’

AUGUST 31, 2017

FROM DRUM! MAGAZINE’S OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE | BY JOE

BOSSO | PHOTOGRAPHY BY EDDIE MALLUK

The drummer is brewing espresso in the kitchen of his home in

Jackson Heights, Queens. “‘Shut up and play your drums.’ I get that
one a lot,” Antonio Sanchez says. “Or ‘I love your drumming, but
man, your political thing sucks.’ That’s another one.” He cracks a
smile, then adds thoughtfully, “Of course, they’re not all like that. A
lot of people agree with me. But it’s amazing to me that so many
people out there think musicians have no right to talk about what’s
going on.”

While he has yet to earn the title of The Left’s Answer To Ted
Nugent, Sanchez has been a highly visible political force on social
media the past few years, and he isn’t about to tone down his views
or the frequency of his posts because of a few naysayers. But
whereas Nugent is pugnacious and caustic, Sanchez handles his
critics the same way he commands a drum kit — with supreme
authority, intelligence, and a confident flair. “I always answer those
people directly: ‘Man, it’s my duty to say something,’” he says. “‘It’s
my duty as an artist, as a Mexican, as a musician, and as a citizen to
speak up.’ That’s what we’re supposed to do. We have to speak up
against our government. They’re our employees — it really comes
down to that.”

He lets his words hang in the air for a second, and then he shrugs
almost defiantly and drives the point home: “I mean, what’s the
alternative?”

For Sanchez, that would be art, which comes in the immediate form
of an astonishing new album that bears a most provocative title:
Bad Hombre. At first, the name almost seems like a bit of a put-on —
if it were the title of a Cheech And Chong album from 40 years ago,
it would surely have been considered a joke — but coming as it does
from Sanchez, who emigrated to America from his native Mexico
City in 1993, it’s a succinctly well-crafted response to some of the
comments made by this nation’s new commander-in-chief, starting
with the remarks the former real estate mogul made when he
announced his candidacy in New York City’s Trump Tower on June
15, 2015.

“Of course it’s personal,” Sanchez admits. “The title is a reflection

of stuff Trump said about Mexicans in particular, like, ‘We have
some bad hombres here, and we’re gonna get ’em out’ — because as
you know, most of us are rapists, drug dealers, and criminals.” He
lets out an exasperated sigh as he shakes his head, choosing his
next words carefully. “Calling my record Bad Hombre is a way to
express what I’m feeling about what’s going on. An artist’s weapon
is art, and this has been a good way for me to get rid of some anger
I have and turn it into something positive. People have a voice on
social media, and I’m very active on that front, but I have my art,
too, and I choose to use it in a purposeful way. The time is right for
that.”
BIRTH OF A BAD HOMBRE

Bad Hombre is Sanchez’s sixth album, but unlike his previous

records — starting with Migration in 2007 and ending with The
Meridian Suite in 2015 — it’s a true solo effort, one that he wrote,
performed, and recorded entirely on his own over the past year in
his studio (“The Lab,” he calls it), which is located in the basement
of his house. He heads downstairs to The Lab, a neat and tidy affair,
devoid of the usual assortment of junk and tangled cables one
usually sees in recording studios. The main focal point of the room
is his Yamaha PHX drum kit, meticulously cleaned and miked for
action, and off to the side is a workstation desk that houses a sparse
arrangement of recording gear: a Pro Tools setup and a Native
Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 keyboard MIDI controller.
Taking a seat at the desk and gazing at the ever-changing images
on a monitor screen, he marvels, “Everything you hear on the
album I did right here.”

In the past, Sanchez conceived and recorded his records in much

the same way — sitting at a piano, improvising melodies and
harmonies that would inspire grooves. For Bad Hombre, however, he
often reversed that approach, starting with the rhythms and filling
in the sonic spaces from there. And at other times he decided that
the best process was no process at all. “No rules, no expectations —
let’s just see where it goes,” he says. “I wanted to try something
that I had never done before. It felt important to me to see what I
could really do if I was left to my own devices, with absolutely no
input from anybody else. This was just me, alone in The Lab, here in
the basement of my house.”

In many ways, Bad Hombre is a continuation — an outgrowth, really

— of the music Sanchez composed and performed for Alejandro G.
Iñárritu’s Academy Award-winning 2014 film Birdman. (Due to a
technicality involving existing classical music, the drummer was
disqualified for an Oscar nomination himself but would ultimately
bag a Grammy for the picture’s score.) “There were some pads on
that and stuff that I wasn’t involved with — some of the
atmospheres were added later by other people,” Sanchez explains.
“But it inspired me to investigate sounds on my own and take them
further. I really got into the technological part of recording. I
started using Pro Tools and became curious about software
instruments. It was like a new world opened up. I was like a
vegetarian discovering different foods. Experimenting with sounds
that weren’t made by real instruments was so inspiring. I really got
into creating something new.”

“I just don’t like it when it sounds like a drummer’s record — you

know what I mean — or it sounds like you’re at a drum clinic.
We’ve heard that kind of thing before.”
—  Antonio Sanchez
One thing Sanchez stresses from the get-go is that, despite his
reputation as a “drummer’s drummer,” a well-earned title from his
longtime association with Pat Metheny along with stints backing
up jazz legends Michael Brecker, Gary Burton, and Chick Corea,
among others, Bad Hombre isn’t really a drum record per se. It’s
something radically different — call it metaphysical mood music.
Not to say there isn’t bravura stick work throughout; Sanchez
unleashes dizzying, shape-shifting torrents of polyrhythms on the
hypnotic track “Momentum,” he performs a one-for-the-ages open
drum solo on the electro masterpiece “Antisocial,” and he lets loose
his inner John Bonham on the thunderous art rocker “The
Crossing.” But on a good many of the tracks, electronics provide the
structural pulse.

“That was the whole idea,” he points out. “I wanted it to be drum

driven, but I didn’t want a bunch of drum solos with electronic
backgrounds as an afterthought. The drums and the soundscapes
kind of overlap here. I just don’t like it when it sounds like a
drummer’s record — you know what I mean — or it sounds like
you’re at a drum clinic. We’ve heard that kind of thing before. I
wanted this to have a different kind of musical meaning, so that the
message was more than just ‘Hey, check out how amazing my skills
are.’”

Asked for how he would classify the album, Sanchez lets out a laugh
and shakes his head. “Man, that’s a hard one,” he says. “It’s not
groove DJ music. It’s a weird mix of stuff. There’s no melodies,
really. I wasn’t really thinking in that way compositionally. I guess
you could call it ‘future jazz’ or something like that. I hate genres —
they get to be so meaningless in a way. And especially if you’re
trying to do something new, they can weigh you down with people’s
perceptions and expectations.” He adds that he played the record
recently for his mentor, Metheny, who weighed in with this
assessment: “Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like
it before.”
FROM WHENCE INSPIRATION COMES

Sanchez has been listening to a lot of electronic music lately. He

lists Aphex Twin, Bibio, Baths, Little Dragon, and Boards of Canada
as some of his current favorites. “Electronic artists tend to
approach their music in different ways,” he theorizes. “There’s a lot
of sound layers that don’t exist in nature with acoustic
instruments, and I find that so inspiring. Sometimes even the
sound from my gear could inspire a tune.”
Such was the case with the vibey, spacious, and altogether
intoxicating track “Home.” One day Sanchez was messing around
on his Kontakt Komplete controller, going through the sound
library, and he became entranced by a peculiar sound called
“Mellow” (for a while he even called the song that). “It was so cool,
just the sound of it,” he recalls. “It inspired me to write this line on
the keyboard. Once I had the line, I immediately went to the drums
and tried to play to that. I was just grooving. I would watch what I
was doing on the big computer screen. It was cool interacting with
myself, but it was like I was having an exchange with somebody
else.”

One other time, he was listening to a sequence of notes played by

an arpeggiator, and he had an idea: What if he kept the time
signature of the sequence in 4/4, but he played the drums in 5/4?
“Obviously, you’d get this overlap at the bar length before it would
come back to the same place,” he explains, “but that’s what was so
cool about it. It kind of snaps back and it all fits.” This was the basis
for the song “Fire Trail/Distant Glow.” “It’s kind of like something I
did with Danilo Perez back in the day. We would play with the clave,
and I would play this big, wide 5/4.”

Sanchez stumbled across a strange and ominous pulse pattern on

his computer that both fascinated and confounded him. He
recorded and sequenced it, and then he sat down at his kit and
started to play some grooves to see what might click. It didn’t take
long for him to realize that a certain Hammer Of The Gods-like
spirit had invaded the room. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, this sounds like a
little bit of a Led Zeppelin thing going on,’” he enthuses. To
completely nail the overwhelming rock gestalt, Sanchez removed
the front head from his bass drum and even pulled out some of his
old crash cymbals and hi-hats. “That’s not really my sound, but it
all worked great on this. Then I started layering a bunch of weird
sounds on it. The tension in the track reminded me of a desert, with
immigrants trying to cross the border. So I called the song ‘The
Crossing.’”

When it came to composing at the drums, Sanchez’s main goal was

to operate with a clean slate, simply improvising to see what
patterns emerged and where they would land. Sometimes he set
unorthodox goals for himself to get out of his comfort zone, and
while improvising for what would eventually become the trippy
title cut, he removed crashes and ride cymbals from his kit — and by
the way, he loves his rides — and focused on the bass drum, snare,
hi-hat, and a couple of bone-dry cymbal stacks. “That’s the beauty
of having my own studio,” he says. “You can do wild stuff and just
go off. You want to improvise and experiment in a commercial
space? That’s gonna cost you, and whether you know it or not, it’ll
inhibit what you’re doing.”

“Momentum” was born from such improvisation. Sanchez started

playing a groove, and before long he found himself gradually
increasing the tempo. Liking the feel, he decided to alter the sound
of his kit by cutting up T-shirts and draping them over his
drumheads. He admits that he’s not the first drummer to utilize this
deadening technique — in the late ’60s, Ringo Starr famously laid
tea towels on his heads for tracks like “Revolution” and “Come
Together” — but it was a first for him. Playing on muffled heads
created a different kind of tension, and Sanchez’s response was to
speed up even more.

“It really took me to a new place as a drummer,” he notes. From

there, he heaped on layers of electronic soundscapes, duplicating
and reversing tracks. “Pretty soon, everything was weird and
delayed. And I did the same stuff to the drums, too: I’d take a tom
roll and then I’d splice it and reverse it. I was plunging myself into
the unknown. ‘What does this button do? I’ll try it.’”
For those still clamoring for him to just “shut up and play your
drums,” Sanchez throws down hard on the album closer,
“Antisocial,” a beautifully constructed, five-minute tour de force of
blitzing bebop, multi-textural dodges, weaving rim-click uppercuts,
and full-frontal power playing that answers the question, “Is there
anything this guy can’t do on the drums?”

At first, he almost let the track exist as its own island, a pure open
solo, but after listening back to it a few times he decided that it
sounded like too much of a departure from everything else on the
album, so he piled on an assortment of radio signals, computer
blips and bleeps, scratches, and other splashes of audio wackiness;
 there are even bits of Sanchez speaking “crazy stuff” in Spanish
punctuated with a cough timed to one of the drumbeats. “It’s pretty
out there,” he says. “Try to picture R2-D2 digging jazz, but he’s on
acid and there’s an intergalactic drum solo playing in the
background.”

To add further surrealism on “Momentum,” he copied the drum

tracks but made sure the two performances weren’t totally in sync.
“That really adds to the unpredictable nature I wanted to convey,”
he says. “You think you’re hearing delay, but you’re not. You’re
hearing two kits displaced. It’s kind of an audio trick.”
Sanchez set up The Lab with the help of engineer Pete Karam, who
mixed Sanchez’s past three albums. The two men worked up a
miking arrangement for the studio drum kit that consists of a pair
of Shure SM57s on the snare, a Sennheiser e 604 for each tom (two
mounted toms and one floor tom), an AKG D112 MkII and Shure
Beta 52 on the bass drum, three Neumann KM 184s for overheads,
and one more on the hi-hat.  “That’s the basic setup,” Sanchez says.
“Pete taught me some good miking techniques, but I like to
experiment a lot.”
A spirit of adventure ruled the day when Sanchez put together the
album’s opening cut, “Bad Hombre Intro.” As the title implies, it’s a
brief number, lasting not even two minutes, and it includes the
least amount of drumming on the entire record. But it does feature
a memorable collaboration of sorts: Over a dusty vinyl recording of
a mariachi band superimposed atop a languid drum and bass
groove, Sanchez’s grandfather, Ignacio Lopez Tarso, a heralded
stage actor who still performs at the age of 92, delivers a heartfelt,
spoken-word tale (in Spanish) of the Mexican Revolution.
“I love the fact that my grandfather is on this record because he’s
the ultimate bad hombre. He’s a badass,” Sanchez says reverently.
“One of his many projects in the ’70s and ’80s was telling tales —
‘corridos’ in Spanish — of the Mexican revolution accompanied by a
great mariachi band. He used to do this live and he recorded a
couple of albums back in the day as well, so I took one of my
favorite corridos called ‘Benito Canales’ and used it with a rhythm
track I’d previously recorded. I played the finished cut for my
grandfather, and he was taken aback at first — it’s so different from
anything he’s ever heard. But then he was like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool:
Your drums and my voice.’ I’m very proud of it.”
Originally, Sanchez had recorded a version of the song that ended
with a sample of Donald Trump uttering his now-infamous “bad
hombre” line from his third and final debate with Hillary Clinton in
October 2016, but acting on the advice of his attorney, the drummer
pulled the sound bite. The track now concludes with Sanchez’s own
voice, heavily distorted, delivering this pointed response: “We are
the bad hombres, and we’re not getting out.”
“It felt good doing it,” he states firmly.

SOUNDS OF CINEMA

Sitting atop Sanchez’s studio desk are four Grammy Awards — three
of them for his work with Pat Metheny, along with his golden
phonograph for Birdman. He picks up his Birdman Grammy and
admits that the massive exposure he received as a result of the
film’s success changed everything for him. “I started doing Birdman
shows, which was a unique opportunity to be on stage in these huge
places all by myself. The movie would be playing, but I would be
there at the drums. I did Birdman in Brazil — 15,000 people came. I
would do this 10-, 15-minute drum solo, and then I’d talk to the
audience — it was great. You can’t plan for something like that to
happen, but when the situation presents itself, you have to jump on
it.”

Birdman has led to other soundtrack opportunities: Sanchez is

currently working on the score for an upcoming MGM/Epix series,
Get Shorty, based in part on Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel. “What
I’m doing for Get Shorty is pretty cool,” he says, “and like Birdman,
it shows you that the drums can spell out what is happening, but
you’re not really spoon-feeding everything for the audience. I get
sent episodes or scenes with temp music, but the idea is, ‘Okay,
what can I do that fits better?’ So I send them two or three different
versions for the cues and they can take what they like. Or maybe
they use something from one scene and use it in a different
episode. It’s really fun and fascinating work, and it’s definitely
something I want to do more of.”
This could make his already-packed schedule even tighter. Touring
Birdman around the world and playing with his own modern jazz
band Migration (which includes his wife Thana Alexa on vocals) has
forced Sanchez to turn down some side gigs of late — with the
exception of Metheny. “I enjoy playing with Pat so much, and he’s
always so inspiring. His impact on me has been enormous. I’ve been
with him for 17 years, and his drive and stamina just amazes me. He
always pushes me in such a positive way, and I really value that.”
And now that Bad Hombre is finished, he’s already thinking of a
sequel — or more, even — hinting that Bad Hombre Volume II or III
could be on the horizon. “Why not do more?” he asks rhetorically.
“I’ve got The Lab here, so there’s no reason why I can’t keep doing
these albums. It would still be a stand-alone thing — I can’t really
play this stuff with my band — but I want to keep pushing myself in
whatever moments I have. Maybe I can do a series of albums that
would feature world music from different countries, but really
obscure world music. That’s a whole area I’d like to get into.”
Or maybe his next project will be something entirely different. It’s
nearly impossible to predict where Sanchez might redirect his
talents, especially when you’re dealing with an artist as
unpredictable as this bad hombre.

MASTERFUL MUSICIANSHIP: PAT METHENY ON ANTONIO

SANCHEZ

BY JOHN PAYNE

It’s the way Antonio Sanchez bravely charts his own drumming
path that impresses his longtime collaborator, guitarist Pat
Metheny. “When I think of all my favorite musicians, there’s always
a singularity at work,” Metheny says. “It’s a sense that the only way
that music could exist was through the prism of that particular
musician’s conception of how things should go. And Bad Hombre
has the kind of individuality and authority that mark it as
completely original in both conception and execution.”
According to Metheny, many drummers play traditionally, because
that’s what the music often requires. But very few can define a style
of their own while letting everyone around them do their own
thing. Sanchez, he says, is just such a drummer.
“There are a few clear lanes in the historical trajectory of how the
kit has developed in this music that gets you to the place where
Max Roach and Roy Haynes defined a general approach to drums in
a small group. That has wound up spawning almost endless sub-
styles. It’s really hard to line up Antonio’s thing to those usual
markers; as with the work of other members of his generation,
sometimes I’m not totally sure I could immediately identify it
outside of the context of the fairly obvious influences that are
present. Yet, functionally, he can hang in a way that is stylistically
appropriate to that tradition while having a high percentage of
unique content.”
Metheny praises Sanchez for his special sensitivity to dynamics — a
must for anyone who plays in his bands. “The drummer is the one
who is basically setting the upper and lower ranges of what the
dynamic range will be in every band,” he says. “There is an
understanding at work with Antonio that I trace to his abilities as a
piano player. I notice that drummers who have skills on other
instruments — Jack DeJohnette comes to mind — often have an
awareness of the whole picture in ways that might not be there
with someone who only plays the drums.
“The core of what Antonio does is a deep musicality that pervades
everything. There are plenty of drum details and technical things
going on, but none of that means anything unless it actually means
something, which in his case it does. Beyond that is the most
important aspect of all: He’s an excellent listener.”
Part of what Sanchez brings to Bad Hombre, Metheny says, is an
important sense of current events that he illuminates in the
album’s music, an internal fire that gives the sound a sense of
urgency. “It resonates with this time and reports on his own vision
of what is happening in the world through his personal experience,
while utilizing his otherworldly skills to represent the things that
have a deep place in his heart and soul. He’s describing something
that goes far beyond ‘Look how good I can play.’”
 
INSIDE THE LAB: DOWN A FLIGHT & TO THE LEFT
BY JOE BOSSO

Originally, Antonio Sanchez envisioned his home studio as a

practice space, but right as he and his engineer pal Pete Karam
started assembling gear and working on the setup, Birdman was
released. “Things got a little more complicated pretty quickly after
that,” Sanchez says. “Suddenly I didn’t have so much time for
practice.
“Before Birdman, I was just doing sideman gigs,” he continues.
“People would call me to go out and play, and between tours I had
all this free time. Now suddenly I’m writing more and figuring out
how to record. I needed gear that wouldn’t take me years to figure
out.”
The system that Sanchez and Karam put together is a model of both
efficiency and efficacy, consisting of an iMac with Avid Pro Tools |
HD 12, a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 weighted
keyboard controller, an Avid Artist Mix control surface, two
Universal Audio Apollo 8 Thunderbolt audio interfaces, a pair of
Yamaha HS8 powered studio monitors, and a host of plug-ins
(Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere and Soundtoys are current faves).
“Everything here is super-useful,” Sanchez notes. “I didn’t want to
invest a bunch of money in gear that I really had no idea how to
use. I’ve always been better at figuring out how to make the most of
having less options. I told Pete my budget, and he said, ‘Okay, these
are really good preamps, and these Yamaha monitors; those are
what you want. The stuff wasn’t cheap-cheap, but you want to get
results out of what you use. When you do that, everything pays for
itself almost immediately.”
The drummer admits that he was still a relative newbie with Pro
Tools when he was offered an assignment to compose the music for
director Fernando Leon De Aranoa’s Spanish political documentary
Politica, Manual De Instrucciones. Rather than turn down the
project, Sanchez seized the opportunity as a learning experience. “I
had a month to figure everything out — write the music, record it,
the whole thing,” he says. “I was incredibly stressed, but I got it all
together.”
When tracking his drums, Sanchez utilizes a wireless mouse and
computer keyboard, so he’s able to operate as his own producer and
engineer, all while seated at his kit. “I just press ‘Record’ and I can
do a take or even multiple takes — whatever I need,” he says. “It’s
great when you’re improvising and you’re trying to work up ideas.
You can stop and start at will, and once you have something good,
then you can edit the performance and really turn it into a track.”
Despite the studio’s small size, Sanchez says that he can get any
drum sound he wants with the use of plug-ins. “People think that
you need this giant drum room, but you really don’t,” he concludes.
“For what I do, my records and the film and TV stuff, I have more
than enough room. My drums sound so good down here, it’s freaky.
People pay thousands of dollars for the same drum sound I can get
in my basement.”