I can personally testify that Antonio Sánchez, who adopted the sobriquet “Bad Hombre” several years ago for a solo drums-and-electronics album, is a truly nice guy. On Labor Day afternoon, Sánchez and Thana Alexa, his wife and bandmate, who’d flown home early after playing the Detroit Jazz Festival the night before, showed me extreme hospitality when I visited their Jackson Heights apartment, two weeks after my initial Zoom conversation with Sánchez from his mother’s Mexico City home. Then, on the subway home, my digital voice recorder fell from my bag—the journalist’s worst fear. After receiving my mortified text, Sánchez immediately offered a do-over. “Things happen,” he said during the Zoom makeup, with a de nada shrug.
They’d been in Detroit with Sánchez’s Bad Hombres y Mujeres quartet, playing repertoire from his second Bad Hombre release, SHIFT (Warner Music), a 16-track drums-and-voice extravaganza on which he reimagines and remixes songs contributed by the likes of Lila Downs, Dave Matthews, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Trent Reznor, to name a shortlist of high Q-score participants. Sánchez recounted that Alexa sang everything, modifying her powerful, nuanced contralto with pedal-triggered harmonic-layering doublers and, when tackling parts written by the men, pitch-altering octavers; Big Yuki sound-explored on keyboards and synths; Lex Sadler fulfilled the groove function on electric bass and keyboard bass, and maneuvered on Ableton Live to manipulate backing tracks from the album for the band to play with, as well as opening up sections for interaction and soloing.
The 51-year-old drummer/composer assembled SHIFT during the COVID lockdown, using the compact basement studio he’d organized to execute film score commissions after creating the Grammy-winning solo drum soundtrack for Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman in 2014. The new project gestated in 2018, when Sánchez, newly signed with Warner after the first Bad Hombre release, was looking for a fresh concept. While in Mexico City, he heard Silvana Estrada, a friend, perform “El Agua y la Miel” solo, accompanying herself on cuatro. He’d played it with her years before at New York’s now-departed 55 Bar.
“It’s a haunting, hypnotic, linear theme,” Sánchez says. “As Silvana did it, I was hearing
