BOBBY SANABRIA

Bobby Sanabria: From the Mambo to the Multiverse by Eugene Holley, Jr.

The Puerto Rican, Bronx-born, drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, and educator Bobby Sanabria speaks the languages of jazz and Latin jazz fluently. An eight-time GRAMMY nominee, Bobby has recorded 10 albums as a leader including Afro-Cuban Dream: Live and in Clave!!! (Arabesque Recordings, 2000) and Kenya Revisited Live!!! (Jazzheads, 2010), his big band recordings with the Multiverse Big Band - which include West Side Story Reimagined (Jazzheads, 2018) - Bobby’s Latin jazz take on the Leonard Bernstein classic, and his latest album, Vox Humana (Jazzheads, 2023), which also features three female vocalists: the multi-GRAMMY winner Janis Siegel from the Manhattan Transfer, Newark’s blues and jazz diva Antoinette Montague and the Bronx's own Dominican-Puerto Rican multilingual powerhouse, Jennifer Jade Ledesna.

Bobby and his big band will perform on September 1 at DC JazzFest, playing several Duke Ellington selections to mark his 125th anniversary. “We’re going to play some Ellington things, but in a different kind of way,” Bobby says with a sly laugh, “the way we do it in the Multiverse.”

Bobby was inspired to form the Multiverse Big Band 26 years ago, by watching a TV show that featured astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and by reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author Octavio Paz. “Tyson was talking about the concept of the multiverse: all these different universes coexisting at the same time,” Bobby says, “and Paz talked about how Latin America is a multiverse of cultures. So that's when I decided to change the name of the band to the Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band. We do everything: Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Venezuela and Puerto Rican rhythms; funk, jazz, R&B, gospel, avant-garde music and everything in the kitchen sink. And we do it authentically. We represent the multiverse of cultures coming together in Latin America.”

To read more, visit https://mags.hothousejazzmagazine.com/8eb448a8b9.html#page/7.