A daring saxophonist in tune with his art.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Music - David Sanchez

He may have grown up in one of the cradles of salsa, Latin jazz, and other fiery Afro-Caribbean styles, but from an early age Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sanchez always had one ear tuned to the beauty and sophistication of European classical music. After a critically lauded, decade-long career as a solo artist that vaulted him to the upper echelons of the jazz world, Sanchez has taken a daring stylistic departure, plunging into the challenging repertoire of some of Latin America's greatest classical composers and surrounding his working sextet with the massed strings of a world-class symphony orchestra. Coral, his Grammy-nominated 2004 release, features the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and a program of works by Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Ant6hio Carlos Jobim. It represents quite a departure for a young musician who grew up listening to and playing Puerto Rican folk music.

The genesis of the ambitious project can be traced to Sanchez's earliest days as a student at San Juan's esteemed Escuela Libre de Musica, where he studied music from the age of twelve to his senior year of high school. "The formal training was European classical oriented--there was no jazz or popular music at all," he recalls. He played saxophone, flute, and clarinet, specializing on the instrument with which he would make his name in the jazz world, the tenor sax.

"I was exposed at an early age to some of the music we perform on Coral," he says. "When I was preparing for my recital in high school, I had some transcriptions for sax, but there isn't much available for the instrument, because it's relatively new, compared to the violin or clarinet. I played some pieces by Brahms and Handel, but they weren't written for saxophone--they were only transcriptions. I had heard the music of Villa-Lobos, mainly guitar pieces, and I was fascinated by a piece he had written called 'Fantasia.'"

Sanchez's first extended foray into this demanding tradition, though, was not without pitfalls. "The piece was originally written for soprano and orchestra," Sanchez remembers. "I got the parts and I was practicing very hard. Unfortunately, I was never able to play the piece in high school, because it was very difficult, and also the accompanying piano part was difficult, because it was adapted from the complete orchestration. The teachers all said that it would take months of rehearsals! That was ray first introduction to trying to play Villa-Lobos."

Born in 1968...