Poncho Sanchez photo courtesy Concord Music Group

Terence Blanchard photo courtesy terenceblanchard.com

In just three short years during the 1940s, a Cuban conguero named Chano Pozo and a jazz trumpeter named Dizzy Gillespie created a new style of American music - Latin jazz.

Three-quarters of a century later, another conga and trumpet pairing - Grammy winners Poncho Sanchez and Terence Blanchard - have created a hot-grooving musical tribute to those legends and the music they created.

Sanchez and Blanchard on Saturday bring songs from that record, "Chano Y Dizzy!" to Jefferson Center.

It's doubtful a player could be any more steeped in the genre than the 60-year-old Sanchez. He was not yet born when Pozo was shot to death at a New York City nightspot in 1948. But thanks to his siblings' record collection, Sanchez discovered the music that would take him on his musical route. Reading the liner notes of the records his brothers and sisters handed down to him, he discovered the wealth of material that Pozo had written, co-written and performed.

"Chano couldn't speak English. Dizzy couldn't speak Spanish. But they both put the music together," Sanchez said in a Jan. 11 phone interview.

Chano and Dizzy

Pozo had only just arrived from Cuba when another player introduced him to Gillespie. Years later, when Sanchez worked with Gillespie, he learned about that meeting.

"It's funny," he said. "I had the honor and pleasure of working with Dizzy, me with his band and him with my band, and like that. Dizzy told me when he met Chano, he didn't even know the name of the drum. He didn't know it was a conga drum. He called it a 'tom-tom.'

"Dizzy knew he liked the sound of it, and he wanted one of them 'tom-tom' players in his band. And it ended up being Chano Pozo."

That was about 1945, and the pair quickly developed a timeless style, evident in such numbers as "Tin Tin Deo," "Manteca" and "Guachi Guaro," which Sanchez and Blanchard mashed into the medley that opens "Chano Y Dizzy!"

The storm of activity was over quickly. Sanchez wonders what could have been.

"You know what I find amazing is that Chano Pozo was only on the American music scene here for about three years, and then he got shot in the El Rio Cafe," he said. "We still play his music today. Can you imagine if Chano had lived another 30 years or something, all the great tunes that would have come out of him and Dizzy?

"Just in that short time, they basically invented Latin jazz."

The genre, Sanchez said, is distinctly American. Some claim to have heard of a Cuban garage band playing similar music, but Pozo and Gillespie brought it to the wider public.

"I'm also proud to say that Latin jazz is mine and yours. If you were born in this country ... that's our music."

Poncho's path

Sanchez, the youngest of 11 children in a suburban Los Angeles family, messed around with a lot of different instruments and styles, including rock guitar and vocals. By the time he gravitated to congas, he had a wealth of musical information handed down from his brothers and sisters.

Some of the first Chano Pozo songs he heard were on Cal Tjader records. By 1975, Sanchez would be the full-time conguero, or conga player, for Tjader, a Latin jazz vibraphonist who became his mentor.

It was the gig that would establish Sanchez's name as a force in Latin jazz music. He was 24 years old.

"Man, when I got the gig with Cal Tjader, it was a dream come true," Sanchez said. "The first real gig I did with him officially was New Year's Eve going into 1975. I had sat in with his band two weeks before New Year's, and he called me up and wanted me to play with him on New Year's Eve at the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, opposite of Carmen McRae's band.

"I'm telling you, I was just a poor boy from the neighborhood. †We didn't have any money, but I loved this rich, great music, and I taught myself how to play a conga drum. And he let me sit in one night and it was amazing.

"I was just happy to sit in with him that night. I could have lived the rest of my life telling people I sat in with Cal Tjader on one night, you know."

He had to convince his siblings that he really was playing with the cat whose records they had so often spun in the Sanchez home.

"My older brothers and sisters, they went crazy when they found out I was in Cal Tjader's band," he said. "They're the ones that had the Cal Tjader records and handed them down to me.

"At first they didn't believe me, then they had to go see me play just to make sure I wasn't lying."

Sanchez played with Tjader for nearly eight years, making at least a dozen records with him - including the Grammy-winning "La Onda Va Bien" - and traveling the world before Tjader died on tour in Manila, the Philippines, of a massive heart attack in 1982.

Newer pairings

That year, Sanchez signed with the Concord label, the same imprint that had released "La Onda Ve Bien." He has remained with Concord since, including for the release of "Chano Y Dizzy!" And in Blanchard, he found an ideal musical collaborator.

Blanchard is a native and continuing resident of New Orleans, a city known for a heavy infusion of both jazz and Latin music.

"I called Terence to see if he would be interested in the project with us, and immediately he said, 'Oh, hell yes,'" Sanchez remembered. "It was like a done deal right there. We didn't even talk money or anything."

Also crucial to the project was Francisco Torres, Sanchez's longtime trombonist/vocalist. Torres and Sanchez co-produced "Chano Y Dizzy!"

Both Blanchard and Torres brought original yet stylistically appropriate music to the project.

If it all sounds a bit serious here, take heart. This is groove music, the kind that makes one move. Sanchez said it's important not to over-intellectualize it. He explained what matters in response to a technical question about the clave's role in Latin jazz rhythms.

"In reality, I think the main thing is to feel the pulse of the music, the feel of the music," he said. "The rhythm and the soul of the music has this spirit that it carries. I think that's the most important thing. †You don't have to be a perfect salsa dancer or a mambo dancer to dance to this music. Hey, do it the way you feel it, you know what I mean."