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Music by John Reid David Sanchez Sextet Saturday, July 1 Jazz Festival Calgary Quincy’s on Seventh Puerto Rican jazz saxophonist David Sanchez’s record company bio closes with a quote from the New York Times that says: "David Sanchez is carrying Latin jazz toward the millennium." For me, however, having heard him live at Vision’s in New York City with the great jazz pianist Kenny Barron’s quintet, and here in Calgary at the festival two years ago, I see Sanchez in a bigger context, because he also plays a lot of straight-ahead jazz. "Exactly," says Sanchez in a phone interview from Toronto, implying that this is a sore spot with him. "That’s just marketing. The record label is just trying to sell some records and they know that if they hype with ‘Latin music’ (records will sell.)" "I told the publicist for this (forthcoming) recording – one of the things they put was ‘Latin jazz saxophonist’ – and I said, ‘No, no, no. My music is way more vast than that. For you to label the music that way, it doesn’t really describe the music. It is not really true.’" As Sanchez says, the labels that get tossed around aren’t fair to either the artist or the fans. "First of all, these Latin jazz people show up to the club, they are confused. There is a confusion with what is Latin jazz, too. There are some people that play salsa – instrumental salsa – and they call that Latin jazz, and that is really not what I do," he laughs. "In fact if you get that crowd where I am going to be playing, they are going to be pretty confused. Just like the same way if you get a completely straight-ahead audience thinking that they are going to hear a whole straight-ahead jazz show, you know, they are just going to be just, like, up in the air." For the tour that will bring him to Calgary for the jazz festival, Sanchez brings his newly expanded sextet, with himself on tenor and soprano saxophones, and the remaining personnel consisting of an alto saxophonist, pianist, bassist, drummer and percussionist. It’s an intriguing combination that should get strong reactions from audiences – good or bad. "It is a completely different vibe. It is all original stuff, except for one Milton Nascimento composition. Open tunes, rubato stuff – it is just music. You can hear a lot of Afro-Caribbean influence, but it is completely open. You can hear Trane (John Coltrane) influences, Ornette (Coleman) influences, (Charles) Mingus influences. "Some people just sit down and listen, ‘That’s some weird shit, man, what are you doing? You are just mixing some bomba traditional music from Puerto Rico, then you are playing all-meter on top of that, and you just go from that to straight-ahead.’ "They don’t even say all that, they just say, ‘Man, what the hell is that, it’s just like a mix of weird sounds and, man, it sounds great’ or ‘I don’t like it’ – as simple as that, they don’t worry about what is that style?" It’s a long way musically from when Sanchez was a protégé of Dizzy Gillespie, having played with the master in his United Nation Orchestra and on recordings in the early 1990s. "Great musician, great human being," Sanchez says of Gillespie. "He had such a strong aura, such a strong personality. Some people were born to direct things. That is nature. He was responsible for one of the first fusions between Afro-Caribbean music and jazz." The David Sanchez Sextet carries on that fusion tradition and builds and adds on to it with its mélange of music that borrows from many genres.

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