About

Bobby Sanabria is a 7-time Grammy-nominee as a leader. He is a noted drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, conductor, producer, educator, documentary film maker, and bandleader of Puerto Rican descent born and raised in NY’s South Bronx. He was the drummer for the acknowledged creator of Afro-Cuban jazz, Mario Bauzá touring and recording three CD’s with him, two of which were Grammy nominated, as well as an incredible variety of artists. From Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria (with whom he started his career) Paquito D’Rivera, Yomo Toro, Candido, The Mills Brothers, Ray Barretto, Chico O’Farrill, Francisco Aguabella, Henry Threadgill, Luis “Perico” Ortiz, Daniel Ponce, Larry Harlow, Daniel Santos, Celia Cruz, Adalberto Santiago, Xiomara Portuondo, Pedrito Martinez, Roswell Rudd, Patato, David Amram, the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, Michael Gibbs, Charles McPherson Jon Faddis, Bob Mintzer, Phil Wilson, Randy Brecker, Charles Tolliver, M’BOOM, Michelle Shocked, Marco Rizo, and many more. In addition he has guest conducted and performed as a soloist with numerous orchestras like the WDR Big Band, The Airmen of Note, The U.S. Jazz Ambassadors, Eau Claire University Big, The University of Calgary Big Band to name just a few.

His first big band recording, Live & in Clave!!! was nominated for a Grammy in 2001. A Grammy nomination followed in 2003 for 50 Years of Mambo: A Tribute to Perez Prado. His 2008 Grammy nominated Big Band Urban Folktales was the first Latin jazz recording to ever reach #1 on the national Jazz Week charts. In 2009 the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra he directs at the Manhattan School of Music was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Kenya Revisited Live!!!, a reworking of the music from Machito’s greatest album, Kenya. In 2011 the recording Tito Puente Masterworks Live!!! by the same orchestra under Bobby’s direction was nominated for a Latin Jazz Grammy. Partial proceeds from the sale of both CD’s continue to support the scholarship program in the Manhattan School of Music’s jazz program. Bobby’s 2012 big band recording, inspired by the writings of Mexican author Octavio Paz, entitled MULTIVERSE was nominated for 2 Grammys. His work as an activist led him to fight to reinstate the Latin Jazz category after NARAS decided to eliminate many ethnic and regional categories in 2010. He and three other colleagues actually sued the Grammys which led to the reinstatement of the category. He is an associate producer of and featured interviewee in the documentaries, The Palladium: Where Mambo Was King, winner of the IMAGINE award for Best TV documentary of 2003, and the Alma Award winning From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale where he also composed the score in 2006 and was broadcast on PBS. In 2009 he was a consultant and featured on screen personality in Latin Music U.S.A. also broadcast on PBS. In 2017 he was also a consultant and featured on air personality for the documentary We Like It Like That: The Story of Latin Boogaloo. He is the composer for the score of the 2017 documentary Some Girls. DRUM! Magazine named him Percussionist of the Year in 2005; he was also named 2011 and 2013 Percussionist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association. This South Bronx native of Puerto Rican parents was a 2006 inductee into the Bronx Walk of Fame. He holds a BM from the Berklee College of Music and is on the faculty of the New School University and the Manhattan School of Music where he has taught Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestras passing on the tradition while moving it forward. His recording with the Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra entitled “Que Viva Harlem!” released in 2014 on the Jazzheads label has received ****1/2 stars in Downbeat magazine.

Mr. Sanabria has conducted hundreds of clinics in the states and worldwide under the auspices of TAMA Drums, Sabian Cymbals, Remo Drumheads, Vic Firth Sticks and Latin Percussion Inc. His background having performed and recorded as both a drummer and/or percussionist with every major figure in the history of Latin jazz, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of both jazz and Latin music history, makes him unique in his field. His critically acclaimed video instructional series, Conga Basics Volumes 1, 2 and 3, have been the highest selling videos in the history of video instruction and have set a standard worldwide. He is the Co-Artistic Director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center and is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Academy as well as The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. His latest recording released in July 2018 is a monumental Latin jazz reworking of the entire score of West Side Story entitled, West Side Story Reimagined, on the Jazzheads label in celebration of the shows recent 60th anniversary (2017) and its composer, Maestro Leonard Bernstein’s centennial (2018). Partial proceeds from the sale of this historic double CD set go the Jazz Foundation of America’s Puerto Relief Fund to aid Bobby’s ancestral homeland after the devastation form hurricanes Irma and Maria.

# Configuration file for the color ls utility - modified for lighter backgrounds # This file goes in the /etc directory, and must be world readable. # You can copy this file to .dir_colors in your $HOME directory to override # the system defaults. # Configuration file for dircolors, a utility to help you set the # LS_COLORS environment variable used by GNU ls with the --color option. # Copyright (C) 1996-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc. # Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, # are permitted provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. # The keywords COLOR, OPTIONS, and EIGHTBIT (honored by the # slackware version of dircolors) are recognized but ignored. # For compatibility, the pattern "^COLOR.*none" is recognized as a way to # disable colorization. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1349579 for details. # Below are TERM entries, which can be a glob patterns, to match # against the TERM environment variable to determine if it is colorizable. TERM Eterm TERM ansi TERM *color* TERM con[0-9]*x[0-9]* TERM cons25 TERM console TERM cygwin TERM dtterm TERM gnome TERM hurd TERM jfbterm TERM konsole TERM kterm TERM linux TERM linux-c TERM mlterm TERM putty TERM rxvt* TERM screen* TERM st TERM terminator TERM tmux* TERM vt100 TERM xterm* # Below are the color init strings for the basic file types. A color init # string consists of one or more of the following numeric codes: # Attribute codes: # 00=none 01=bold 04=underscore 05=blink 07=reverse 08=concealed # Text color codes: # 30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white # Background color codes: # 40=black 41=red 42=green 43=yellow 44=blue 45=magenta 46=cyan 47=white #NORMAL 00 # no color code at all #FILE 00 # regular file: use no color at all RESET 0 # reset to "normal" color DIR 00;34 # directory LINK 00;36 # symbolic link. (If you set this to 'target' instead of a # numerical value, the color is as for the file pointed to.) MULTIHARDLINK 00 # regular file with more than one link FIFO 40;33 # pipe SOCK 00;35 # socket DOOR 00;35 # door BLK 40;33;01 # block device driver CHR 40;33;01 # character device driver ORPHAN 40;31;01 # symlink to nonexistent file, or non-stat'able file ... MISSING 01;05;37;41 # ... and the files they point to SETUID 37;41 # file that is setuid (u+s) SETGID 30;43 # file that is setgid (g+s) CAPABILITY 30;41 # file with capability STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE 30;42 # dir that is sticky and other-writable (+t,o+w) OTHER_WRITABLE 34;42 # dir that is other-writable (o+w) and not sticky STICKY 37;44 # dir with the sticky bit set (+t) and not other-writable # This is for files with execute permission: EXEC 00;32 # List any file extensions like '.gz' or '.tar' that you would like ls # to colorize below. Put the extension, a space, and the color init string. # (and any comments you want to add after a '#') # If you use DOS-style suffixes, you may want to uncomment the following: #.cmd 01;32 # executables (bright green) #.exe 01;32 #.com 01;32 #.btm 01;32 #.bat 01;32 # Or if you want to colorize scripts even if they do not have the # executable bit actually set. #.sh 01;32 #.csh 01;32 # archives or compressed (bright red) .tar 00;31 .tgz 00;31 .arc 00;31 .arj 00;31 .taz 00;31 .lha 00;31 .lz4 00;31 .lzh 00;31 .lzma 00;31 .tlz 00;31 .txz 00;31 .tzo 00;31 .t7z 00;31 .zip 00;31 .z 00;31 .dz 00;31 .gz 00;31 .lrz 00;31 .lz 00;31 .lzo 00;31 .xz 00;31 .zst 00;31 .tzst 00;31 .bz2 00;31 .bz 00;31 .tbz 00;31 .tbz2 00;31 .tz 00;31 .deb 00;31 .rpm 00;31 .jar 00;31 .war 00;31 .ear 00;31 .sar 00;31 .rar 00;31 .alz 00;31 .ace 00;31 .zoo 00;31 .cpio 00;31 .7z 00;31 .rz 00;31 .cab 00;31 .wim 00;31 .swm 00;31 .dwm 00;31 .esd 00;31 # image formats .jpg 00;35 .jpeg 00;35 .mjpg 00;35 .mjpeg 00;35 .gif 00;35 .bmp 00;35 .pbm 00;35 .pgm 00;35 .ppm 00;35 .tga 00;35 .xbm 00;35 .xpm 00;35 .tif 00;35 .tiff 00;35 .png 00;35 .svg 00;35 .svgz 00;35 .mng 00;35 .pcx 00;35 .mov 00;35 .mpg 00;35 .mpeg 00;35 .m2v 00;35 .mkv 00;35 .webm 00;35 .ogm 00;35 .mp4 00;35 .m4v 00;35 .mp4v 00;35 .vob 00;35 .qt 00;35 .nuv 00;35 .wmv 00;35 .asf 00;35 .rm 00;35 .rmvb 00;35 .flc 00;35 .avi 00;35 .fli 00;35 .flv 00;35 .gl 00;35 .dl 00;35 .xcf 00;35 .xwd 00;35 .yuv 00;35 .cgm 00;35 .emf 00;35 # https://wiki.xiph.org/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions .ogv 00;35 .ogx 00;35 # audio formats .aac 00;36 .au 00;36 .flac 00;36 .m4a 00;36 .mid 00;36 .midi 00;36 .mka 00;36 .mp3 00;36 .mpc 00;36 .ogg 00;36 .ra 00;36 .wav 00;36 # https://wiki.xiph.org/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions .oga 00;36 .opus 00;36 .spx 00;36 .xspf 00;36