Poncho Sanchez

The Canyon Presents
PONCHO SANCHEZ
SAT, 18 JUL 2026 at 09:00PM PDT
Ages: Guests Under 18 Require Accompanying Adult
Doors Open: 06:00PM
OnSale: Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at 10:00AM PDT
Announcement: Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at 10:00AM PDT
GRAMMY-winning bandleader, conguero, and percussionist Poncho Sanchez is among
the most influential percussionists in jazz. For more than four decades, he’s stirred up a
fiery stew of straight ahead jazz, gritty soul music, and infectious melodies and rhythms
from a variety of Latin American and South American sources. Throughout his career,
Sanchez has held aloft the torch lit by such innovators as Mongo Santamaria, Tito
Puente and Cal Tjader, embraced by each of those icons and entrusted to carry forward
the traditions of Latin Jazz.
Sanchez was born in Laredo, Texas, in 1951 to a large Mexican-American family, but
grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, where he was raised on an unusual cross section of
sounds that included straightahead jazz, Latin jazz and American soul. By his teen years,
his musical consciousness had been solidified by the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis,
Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown. Along the way, he
taught himself to play guitar, flute, drums and timbales, but eventually settled on the
congas. Sanchez landed a permanent spot in Cal Tjader's band in 1975, and remained
with him until the bandleader's death in 1982. Sanchez then shifted his focus to his own
group, which he had formed in 1980, and signed with powerhouse label Concord for the
release of ‘Sonando’, beginning a musical partnership that has spanned nearly four
decades and yielded more than two dozen recordings.
After more than two decades in music, Sanchez's efforts paid off when his album ‘Latin
Soul’ received a GRAMMY award as Best Latin Album of 1999. Throughout the next
decade, Sanchez continued to record, releasing such albums as 2000's ‘Soul of the
Conga’, 2001's ‘Latin Spirits’, 2003's ‘Out of Sight!’, 2005's ‘Do It!’, 2007's ‘Raise Your