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Antonio Sánchez and Bad Hombre With Thana Alexa, BIGYUKI, and Lex Sadler

$44.50–$49.50

Members who give $500+ annually receive 10% off concert tickets.

2022 Concert Series sponsored by

Sánchez does what all artists, regardless of genre or medium, aspire to do: he expertly uses the tools at his command to communicate, sending a complex yet clear message.

— PopMatters

Drummer and composer Antonio Sánchez has been playing the drums since he was five years old. He cut his teeth in Mexico’s rock, jazz, and Latin scenes in his early teens before recording and performing with such jazz superstars as Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and Gary Burton.  

Sánchez’s popularity soared in 2014, when he scored filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman . He won a Grammy for his kinetic, percussion-based score, and he has since won three more as a bandleader. He has also won three Drummer of the Year awards from Modern Drummer —two in the jazz category and one in the fusion category. Sánchez has been featured on the covers of Modern Drummer , DownBeat , JazzTimes , and Drum! .

In August, Warner Bros. Records released SHIFT (Bad Hombre Vol II) . The much-anticipated recording features Sánchez collaborating with such artists as Trent Reznor, Lila Downs, Meshell Ndegeocello, Dave Matthews, and more.

More Information

• antoniosanchez.net

Sanderson Lincoln

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Supported by

Producer’s Circle member Tom G.

Related Events

Antonio Sánchez & Bad Hombre: Tiny Desk Concert

Watching Antonio Sánchez and Bad Hombre behind the Tiny Desk is witnessing an entire band exploring the rhythm of language.

Fueled by Sánchez's propulsive drumming, the band both complements and acts as a foil to vocalist Thana Alexa's soaring interpretations of three tracks from Sánchez's latest album, SHIFT (Bad Hombre, Vol. II).

Bassist Lex Sadler and keyboard wizard BIGYUKI join Sánchez and Alexa to kick things off with "Doyenne," a song that features a powerful drum solo that reflects why Sánchez is a first-call sideman to a number of A-list jazz musicians (not to mention his 18 years with guitarist Pat Metheny ).

On "The Bucket," the band falls into a drone-like groove while Alexa's vocals swoop and soar through the music. Her spoken-word delivery at the end is powerful for its content as well as the band's supple support.

Chilean-French singer Ana Tijoux co-wrote the last tune, "Mi palabra," and true to her hip-hop roots, the song is a meditation on how language and voice can be the ultimate source of rhythm. BIGYUKI moves the band from a whisper to a scream, pulling out a variety of notes and sounds during a solo that mirrors the rhythmic sensibilities that Tijoux has set up with her stream of free-flowing word play.

Antonio Sánchez observes the world with a drummer's sensibilities. As he tours with his pals in Bad Hombre and puts on performances like these, he expresses the kind of musicality that makes him one of today's best jazz drummers.

• "The Bucket"
• "Mi palabra"
• Antonio Sánchez: drums
• Thana Alexa: vocals 
• BIGYUKI: keyboards
• Lex Sadler: bass

TINY DESK TEAM

• Producer: Bob Boilen
• Director/Editor: Maia Stern
• Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin
• Series Producer: Bobby Carter
• Videographers: Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Kara Frame, Sofia Seidel
• Audio Assistant: Neil Tevault 
• Production Assistant: Jill Britton
• Tiny Desk Team: Suraya Mohamed, Marissa Lorusso, Hazel Cills, Ashley Pointer, Pilar Galvan
• VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

• Live TV stream

Antonio Sánchez & Bad Hombre: Tiny Desk Concert

Watching Antonio Sánchez and Bad Hombre behind the Tiny Desk is witnessing an entire band exploring the rhythm of language.

Fueled by Sánchez's propulsive drumming, the band both complements and acts as a foil to vocalist Thana Alexa's soaring interpretations of three tracks from Sánchez's latest album, SHIFT (Bad Hombre, Vol. II).

Bassist Lex Sadler and keyboard wizard BIGYUKI join Sánchez and Alexa to kick things off with "Doyenne," a song that features a powerful drum solo that reflects why Sánchez is a first-call sideman to a number of A-list jazz musicians (not to mention his 18 years with guitarist Pat Metheny ).

On "The Bucket," the band falls into a drone-like groove while Alexa's vocals swoop and soar through the music. Her spoken-word delivery at the end is powerful for its content as well as the band's supple support.

Chilean-French singer Ana Tijoux co-wrote the last tune, "Mi palabra," and true to her hip-hop roots, the song is a meditation on how language and voice can be the ultimate source of rhythm. BIGYUKI moves the band from a whisper to a scream, pulling out a variety of notes and sounds during a solo that mirrors the rhythmic sensibilities that Tijoux has set up with her stream of free-flowing word play.

Antonio Sánchez observes the world with a drummer's sensibilities. As he tours with his pals in Bad Hombre and puts on performances like these, he expresses the kind of musicality that makes him one of today's best jazz drummers.

• "The Bucket"
• "Mi palabra"
• Antonio Sánchez: drums
• Thana Alexa: vocals 
• BIGYUKI: keyboards
• Lex Sadler: bass

TINY DESK TEAM

• Producer: Bob Boilen
• Director/Editor: Maia Stern
• Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin
• Series Producer: Bobby Carter
• Videographers: Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Kara Frame, Sofia Seidel
• Audio Assistant: Neil Tevault 
• Production Assistant: Jill Britton
• Tiny Desk Team: Suraya Mohamed, Marissa Lorusso, Hazel Cills, Ashley Pointer, Pilar Galvan
• VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

photo credit: Bad Hombre

Neha Talreja

February 6, 2024

The East Village has enough good taquerias to rehabilitate you after a hangover— Taqueria St. Marks and Electric Burrito are our personal EMTs—but there are very few places around the neighborhood where you can eat a fried fish tostada in a little black dress. You'll want to keep Bad Hombre in your back pocket whenever you want good Mexican food and cocktails in an after-hours atmosphere. 

Small tables and banquettes line the walls of a narrow entryway, leading up to a horseshoe bar in the back. Behind it, an LED sunrise lights up the rest of the room just enough to differentiate between your scallop crudo and octopus aguachile. This place isn’t particularly innovative, but they have a solid balance of basic entrees like lime chicken skewers and steak chimichurri, as well as some unexpected highlights, like a tostada topped with an absurdly large brick of fish, fried until it gets a delicate tempura crust and some subtle curry flavor. You can do a date night here for under $150, and it's always easy to get a walk-in table.

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Antonio Sanchez Talks About His New Album, ‘Bad Hombre’

From drum magazine’s october 2017 issue | by joe bosso | photography by eddie malluk.

The drummer is brewing espresso in the kitchen of his home in Jackson Heights, Queens. “‘Shut up and play your drums.’ I get that one a lot,” Antonio Sanchez says. “Or ‘I love your drumming, but man, your political thing sucks.’ That’s another one.” He cracks a smile, then adds thoughtfully, “Of course, they’re not all like that. A lot of people agree with me. But it’s amazing to me that so many people out there think musicians have no right to talk about what’s going on.”

While he has yet to earn the title of The Left’s Answer To Ted Nugent, Sanchez has been a highly visible political force on social media the past few years, and he isn’t about to tone down his views or the frequency of his posts because of a few naysayers. But whereas Nugent is pugnacious and caustic, Sanchez handles his critics the same way he commands a drum kit — with supreme authority, intelligence, and a confident flair. “I always answer those people directly: ‘Man, it’s my duty to say something,’” he says. “‘It’s my duty as an artist, as a Mexican, as a musician, and as a citizen to speak up.’ That’s what we’re supposed to do. We have to speak up against our government. They’re our employees — it really comes down to that.”

He lets his words hang in the air for a second, and then he shrugs almost defiantly and drives the point home: “I mean, what’s the alternative?”

For Sanchez, that would be art, which comes in the immediate form of an astonishing new album that bears a most provocative title: Bad Hombre . At first, the name almost seems like a bit of a put-on — if it were the title of a Cheech And Chong album from 40 years ago, it would surely have been considered a joke — but coming as it does from Sanchez, who emigrated to America from his native Mexico City in 1993, it’s a succinctly well-crafted response to some of the comments made by this nation’s new commander-in-chief, starting with the remarks the former real estate mogul made when he announced his candidacy in New York City’s Trump Tower on June 15, 2015.

“Of course it’s personal,” Sanchez admits. “The title is a reflection of stuff Trump said about Mexicans in particular, like, ‘We have some bad hombres here, and we’re gonna get ’em out’ — because as you know, most of us are rapists, drug dealers, and criminals.” He lets out an exasperated sigh as he shakes his head, choosing his next words carefully. “Calling my record Bad Hombre is a way to express what I’m feeling about what’s going on. An artist’s weapon is art, and this has been a good way for me to get rid of some anger I have and turn it into something positive. People have a voice on social media, and I’m very active on that front, but I have my art, too, and I choose to use it in a purposeful way. The time is right for that.”

Birth Of A Bad Hombre

Bad Hombre is Sanchez’s sixth album, but unlike his previous records — starting with Migration in 2007 and ending with The Meridian Suite in 2015 — it’s a true solo effort, one that he wrote, performed, and recorded entirely on his own over the past year in his studio (“The Lab,” he calls it), which is located in the basement of his house. He heads downstairs to The Lab, a neat and tidy affair, devoid of the usual assortment of junk and tangled cables one usually sees in recording studios. The main focal point of the room is his Yamaha PHX drum kit, meticulously cleaned and miked for action, and off to the side is a workstation desk that houses a sparse arrangement of recording gear: a Pro Tools setup and a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 keyboard MIDI controller. Taking a seat at the desk and gazing at the ever-changing images on a monitor screen, he marvels, “Everything you hear on the album I did right here.”

In the past, Sanchez conceived and recorded his records in much the same way — sitting at a piano, improvising melodies and harmonies that would inspire grooves. For Bad Hombre , however, he often reversed that approach, starting with the rhythms and filling in the sonic spaces from there. And at other times he decided that the best process was no process at all. “No rules, no expectations — let’s just see where it goes,” he says. “I wanted to try something that I had never done before. It felt important to me to see what I could really do if I was left to my own devices, with absolutely no input from anybody else. This was just me, alone in The Lab, here in the basement of my house.”

In many ways, Bad Hombre is a continuation — an outgrowth, really — of the music Sanchez composed and performed for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Academy Award-winning 2014 film Birdman . (Due to a technicality involving existing classical music, the drummer was disqualified for an Oscar nomination himself but would ultimately bag a Grammy for the picture’s score.) “There were some pads on that and stuff that I wasn’t involved with — some of the atmospheres were added later by other people,” Sanchez explains. “But it inspired me to investigate sounds on my own and take them further. I really got into the technological part of recording. I started using Pro Tools and became curious about software instruments. It was like a new world opened up. I was like a vegetarian discovering different foods. Experimenting with sounds that weren’t made by real instruments was so inspiring. I really got into creating something new.”

“I just don’t like it when it sounds like a drummer’s record — you know what I mean — or it sounds like you’re at a drum clinic. We’ve heard that kind of thing before.” —  Antonio Sanchez

One thing Sanchez stresses from the get-go is that, despite his reputation as a “drummer’s drummer,” a well-earned title from his longtime association with Pat Metheny along with stints backing up jazz legends Michael Brecker, Gary Burton, and Chick Corea, among others, Bad Hombre isn’t really a drum record per se. It’s something radically different — call it metaphysical mood music. Not to say there isn’t bravura stick work throughout; Sanchez unleashes dizzying, shape-shifting torrents of polyrhythms on the hypnotic track “Momentum,” he performs a one-for-the-ages open drum solo on the electro masterpiece “Antisocial,” and he lets loose his inner John Bonham on the thunderous art rocker “The Crossing.” But on a good many of the tracks, electronics provide the structural pulse.

“That was the whole idea,” he points out. “I wanted it to be drum driven, but I didn’t want a bunch of drum solos with electronic backgrounds as an afterthought. The drums and the soundscapes kind of overlap here. I just don’t like it when it sounds like a drummer’s record — you know what I mean — or it sounds like you’re at a drum clinic. We’ve heard that kind of thing before. I wanted this to have a different kind of musical meaning, so that the message was more than just ‘Hey, check out how amazing my skills are.’”

Asked for how he would classify the album, Sanchez lets out a laugh and shakes his head. “Man, that’s a hard one,” he says. “It’s not groove DJ music. It’s a weird mix of stuff. There’s no melodies, really. I wasn’t really thinking in that way compositionally. I guess you could call it ‘future jazz’ or something like that. I hate genres — they get to be so meaningless in a way. And especially if you’re trying to do something new, they can weigh you down with people’s perceptions and expectations.” He adds that he played the record recently for his mentor, Metheny, who weighed in with this assessment: “Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like it before.”

From Whence Inspiration Comes

Sanchez has been listening to a lot of electronic music lately. He lists Aphex Twin, Bibio, Baths, Little Dragon, and Boards of Canada as some of his current favorites. “Electronic artists tend to approach their music in different ways,” he theorizes. “There’s a lot of sound layers that don’t exist in nature with acoustic instruments, and I find that so inspiring. Sometimes even the sound from my gear could inspire a tune.”

Such was the case with the vibey, spacious, and altogether intoxicating track “Home.” One day Sanchez was messing around on his Kontakt Komplete controller, going through the sound library, and he became entranced by a peculiar sound called “Mellow” (for a while he even called the song that). “It was so cool, just the sound of it,” he recalls. “It inspired me to write this line on the keyboard. Once I had the line, I immediately went to the drums and tried to play to that. I was just grooving. I would watch what I was doing on the big computer screen. It was cool interacting with myself, but it was like I was having an exchange with somebody else.”

One other time, he was listening to a sequence of notes played by an arpeggiator, and he had an idea: What if he kept the time signature of the sequence in 4/4, but he played the drums in 5/4? “Obviously, you’d get this overlap at the bar length before it would come back to the same place,” he explains, “but that’s what was so cool about it. It kind of snaps back and it all fits.” This was the basis for the song “Fire Trail/Distant Glow.” “It’s kind of like something I did with Danilo Perez back in the day. We would play with the clave, and I would play this big, wide 5/4.”

Photo By Eddie Malluk

Sanchez stumbled across a strange and ominous pulse pattern on his computer that both fascinated and confounded him. He recorded and sequenced it, and then he sat down at his kit and started to play some grooves to see what might click. It didn’t take long for him to realize that a certain Hammer Of The Gods -like spirit had invaded the room. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, this sounds like a little bit of a Led Zeppelin thing going on,’” he enthuses. To completely nail the overwhelming rock gestalt, Sanchez removed the front head from his bass drum and even pulled out some of his old crash cymbals and hi-hats. “That’s not really my sound, but it all worked great on this. Then I started layering a bunch of weird sounds on it. The tension in the track reminded me of a desert, with immigrants trying to cross the border. So I called the song ‘The Crossing.’”

When it came to composing at the drums, Sanchez’s main goal was to operate with a clean slate, simply improvising to see what patterns emerged and where they would land. Sometimes he set unorthodox goals for himself to get out of his comfort zone, and while improvising for what would eventually become the trippy title cut, he removed crashes and ride cymbals from his kit — and by the way, he loves his rides — and focused on the bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and a couple of bone-dry cymbal stacks. “That’s the beauty of having my own studio,” he says. “You can do wild stuff and just go off. You want to improvise and experiment in a commercial space? That’s gonna cost you, and whether you know it or not, it’ll inhibit what you’re doing.”

“Momentum” was born from such improvisation. Sanchez started playing a groove, and before long he found himself gradually increasing the tempo. Liking the feel, he decided to alter the sound of his kit by cutting up T-shirts and draping them over his drumheads. He admits that he’s not the first drummer to utilize this deadening technique — in the late ’60s, Ringo Starr famously laid tea towels on his heads for tracks like “Revolution” and “Come Together” — but it was a first for him. Playing on muffled heads created a different kind of tension, and Sanchez’s response was to speed up even more.

“It really took me to a new place as a drummer,” he notes. From there, he heaped on layers of electronic soundscapes, duplicating and reversing tracks. “Pretty soon, everything was weird and delayed. And I did the same stuff to the drums, too: I’d take a tom roll and then I’d splice it and reverse it. I was plunging myself into the unknown. ‘What does this button do? I’ll try it.’”

For those still clamoring for him to just “shut up and play your drums,” Sanchez throws down hard on the album closer, “Antisocial,” a beautifully constructed, five-minute tour de force of blitzing bebop, multi-textural dodges, weaving rim-click uppercuts, and full-frontal power playing that answers the question, “Is there anything this guy can’t do on the drums?”

At first, he almost let the track exist as its own island, a pure open solo, but after listening back to it a few times he decided that it sounded like too much of a departure from everything else on the album, so he piled on an assortment of radio signals, computer blips and bleeps, scratches, and other splashes of audio wackiness;  there are even bits of Sanchez speaking “crazy stuff” in Spanish punctuated with a cough timed to one of the drumbeats. “It’s pretty out there,” he says. “Try to picture R2-D2 digging jazz, but he’s on acid and there’s an intergalactic drum solo playing in the background.”

To add further surrealism on “Momentum,” he copied the drum tracks but made sure the two performances weren’t totally in sync. “That really adds to the unpredictable nature I wanted to convey,” he says. “You think you’re hearing delay, but you’re not. You’re hearing two kits displaced. It’s kind of an audio trick.”

Sanchez set up The Lab with the help of engineer Pete Karam, who mixed Sanchez’s past three albums. The two men worked up a miking arrangement for the studio drum kit that consists of a pair of Shure SM57s on the snare, a Sennheiser e 604 for each tom (two mounted toms and one floor tom), an AKG D112 MkII and Shure Beta 52 on the bass drum, three Neumann KM 184s for overheads, and one more on the hi-hat.  “That’s the basic setup,” Sanchez says. “Pete taught me some good miking techniques, but I like to experiment a lot.”

A spirit of adventure ruled the day when Sanchez put together the album’s opening cut, “Bad Hombre Intro.” As the title implies, it’s a brief number, lasting not even two minutes, and it includes the least amount of drumming on the entire record. But it does feature a memorable collaboration of sorts: Over a dusty vinyl recording of a mariachi band superimposed atop a languid drum and bass groove, Sanchez’s grandfather, Ignacio Lopez Tarso, a heralded stage actor who still performs at the age of 92, delivers a heartfelt, spoken-word tale (in Spanish) of the Mexican Revolution.

“I love the fact that my grandfather is on this record because he’s the ultimate bad hombre. He’s a badass,” Sanchez says reverently. “One of his many projects in the ’70s and ’80s was telling tales — ‘corridos’ in Spanish — of the Mexican revolution accompanied by a great mariachi band. He used to do this live and he recorded a couple of albums back in the day as well, so I took one of my favorite corridos called ‘Benito Canales’ and used it with a rhythm track I’d previously recorded. I played the finished cut for my grandfather, and he was taken aback at first — it’s so different from anything he’s ever heard. But then he was like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool: Your drums and my voice.’ I’m very proud of it.”

Originally, Sanchez had recorded a version of the song that ended with a sample of Donald Trump uttering his now-infamous “bad hombre” line from his third and final debate with Hillary Clinton in October 2016, but acting on the advice of his attorney, the drummer pulled the sound bite. The track now concludes with Sanchez’s own voice, heavily distorted, delivering this pointed response: “ We are the bad hombres, and we’re not getting out.”

“It felt good doing it,” he states firmly.

Sounds Of Cinema

Sitting atop Sanchez’s studio desk are four Grammy Awards — three of them for his work with Pat Metheny, along with his golden phonograph for Birdman . He picks up his Birdman Grammy and admits that the massive exposure he received as a result of the film’s success changed everything for him. “I started doing Birdman shows, which was a unique opportunity to be on stage in these huge places all by myself. The movie would be playing, but I would be there at the drums. I did Birdman in Brazil — 15,000 people came. I would do this 10-, 15-minute drum solo, and then I’d talk to the audience — it was great. You can’t plan for something like that to happen, but when the situation presents itself, you have to jump on it.”

Birdman has led to other soundtrack opportunities: Sanchez is currently working on the score for an upcoming MGM/Epix series, Get Shorty , based in part on Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel. “What I’m doing for Get Shorty is pretty cool,” he says, “and like Birdman , it shows you that the drums can spell out what is happening, but you’re not really spoon-feeding everything for the audience. I get sent episodes or scenes with temp music, but the idea is, ‘Okay, what can I do that fits better?’ So I send them two or three different versions for the cues and they can take what they like. Or maybe they use something from one scene and use it in a different episode. It’s really fun and fascinating work, and it’s definitely something I want to do more of.”

This could make his already-packed schedule even tighter. Touring Birdman around the world and playing with his own modern jazz band Migration (which includes his wife Thana Alexa on vocals) has forced Sanchez to turn down some side gigs of late — with the exception of Metheny. “I enjoy playing with Pat so much, and he’s always so inspiring. His impact on me has been enormous. I’ve been with him for 17 years, and his drive and stamina just amazes me. He always pushes me in such a positive way, and I really value that.”

And now that Bad Hombre is finished, he’s already thinking of a sequel — or more, even — hinting that Bad Hombre Volume II or III could be on the horizon. “Why not do more?” he asks rhetorically. “I’ve got The Lab here, so there’s no reason why I can’t keep doing these albums. It would still be a stand-alone thing — I can’t really play this stuff with my band — but I want to keep pushing myself in whatever moments I have. Maybe I can do a series of albums that would feature world music from different countries, but really obscure world music. That’s a whole area I’d like to get into.”

Or maybe his next project will be something entirely different. It’s nearly impossible to predict where Sanchez might redirect his talents, especially when you’re dealing with an artist as unpredictable as this bad hombre.

Masterful Musicianship: Pat Metheny On Antonio Sanchez

Photo By John Peden

By John Payne

It’s the way Antonio Sanchez bravely charts his own drumming path that impresses his longtime collaborator, guitarist Pat Metheny. “When I think of all my favorite musicians, there’s always a singularity at work,” Metheny says. “It’s a sense that the only way that music could exist was through the prism of that particular musician’s conception of how things should go. And Bad Hombre has the kind of individuality and authority that mark it as completely original in both conception and execution.”

According to Metheny, many drummers play traditionally, because that’s what the music often requires. But very few can define a style of their own while letting everyone around them do their own thing. Sanchez, he says, is just such a drummer.

“There are a few clear lanes in the historical trajectory of how the kit has developed in this music that gets you to the place where Max Roach and Roy Haynes defined a general approach to drums in a small group. That has wound up spawning almost endless sub-styles. It’s really hard to line up Antonio’s thing to those usual markers; as with the work of other members of his generation, sometimes I’m not totally sure I could immediately identify it outside of the context of the fairly obvious influences that are present. Yet, functionally, he can hang in a way that is stylistically appropriate to that tradition while having a high percentage of unique content.”

Metheny praises Sanchez for his special sensitivity to dynamics — a must for anyone who plays in his bands. “The drummer is the one who is basically setting the upper and lower ranges of what the dynamic range will be in every band,” he says. “There is an understanding at work with Antonio that I trace to his abilities as a piano player. I notice that drummers who have skills on other instruments — Jack DeJohnette comes to mind — often have an awareness of the whole picture in ways that might not be there with someone who only plays the drums.

“The core of what Antonio does is a deep musicality that pervades everything. There are plenty of drum details and technical things going on, but none of that means anything unless it actually means something, which in his case it does. Beyond that is the most important aspect of all: He’s an excellent listener.”

Part of what Sanchez brings to Bad Hombre, Metheny says, is an important sense of current events that he illuminates in the album’s music, an internal fire that gives the sound a sense of urgency. “It resonates with this time and reports on his own vision of what is happening in the world through his personal experience, while utilizing his otherworldly skills to represent the things that have a deep place in his heart and soul. He’s describing something that goes far beyond ‘Look how good I can play.’”

Inside The Lab: Down A Flight & To The Left

By joe bosso.

Originally, Antonio Sanchez envisioned his home studio as a practice space, but right as he and his engineer pal Pete Karam started assembling gear and working on the setup, Birdman was released. “Things got a little more complicated pretty quickly after that,” Sanchez says. “Suddenly I didn’t have so much time for practice.

“Before Birdman, I was just doing sideman gigs,” he continues. “People would call me to go out and play, and between tours I had all this free time. Now suddenly I’m writing more and figuring out how to record. I needed gear that wouldn’t take me years to figure out.”

The system that Sanchez and Karam put together is a model of both efficiency and efficacy, consisting of an iMac with Avid Pro Tools | HD 12, a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 weighted keyboard controller, an Avid Artist Mix control surface, two Universal Audio Apollo 8 Thunderbolt audio interfaces, a pair of Yamaha HS8 powered studio monitors, and a host of plug-ins (Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere and Soundtoys are current faves).

“Everything here is super-useful,” Sanchez notes. “I didn’t want to invest a bunch of money in gear that I really had no idea how to use. I’ve always been better at figuring out how to make the most of having less options. I told Pete my budget, and he said, ‘Okay, these are really good preamps, and these Yamaha monitors; those are what you want. The stuff wasn’t cheap-cheap, but you want to get results out of what you use. When you do that, everything pays for itself almost immediately.”

The drummer admits that he was still a relative newbie with Pro Tools when he was offered an assignment to compose the music for director Fernando Leon De Aranoa’s Spanish political documentary Politica, Manual De Instrucciones. Rather than turn down the project, Sanchez seized the opportunity as a learning experience. “I had a month to figure everything out — write the music, record it, the whole thing,” he says. “I was incredibly stressed, but I got it all together.”

When tracking his drums, Sanchez utilizes a wireless mouse and computer keyboard, so he’s able to operate as his own producer and engineer, all while seated at his kit. “I just press ‘Record’ and I can do a take or even multiple takes — whatever I need,” he says. “It’s great when you’re improvising and you’re trying to work up ideas. You can stop and start at will, and once you have something good, then you can edit the performance and really turn it into a track.”

Despite the studio’s small size, Sanchez says that he can get any drum sound he wants with the use of plug-ins. “People think that you need this giant drum room, but you really don’t,” he concludes. “For what I do, my records and the film and TV stuff, I have more than enough room. My drums sound so good down here, it’s freaky. People pay thousands of dollars for the same drum sound I can get in my basement.”

Groove Analysis: Antonio Sanchez

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Music Interviews

Antonio sánchez brings electronics and politics to 'bad hombre'.

Nate Chinen

Antonio Sánchez , the virtuoso drummer and composer, can often be found on tour — tending rhythmic fires for guitarist Pat Metheny; leading Migration, his own dynamic post-bop band; or performing his solo drum score at screenings of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) , the 2014 Alejandro G. Iñárritu film.

For the moment, though, Sánchez is back home in Mexico City, catching up and checking in. His network of family and friends made it safely through the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that killed hundreds and caused massive destruction there. "The way people have come together, it's incredible," he says, speaking by Skype over the weekend from his mother's house. "But the recovery will go on for a long time. Just like in Puerto Rico."

Sánchez lives in New York — but along with his ties to Mexico City, he has a small beachfront apartment in Puerto Rico. ("I don't even know what state it's in now," he says.) So the devastating natural disasters of the last couple of weeks have hit close to home on more than one front. "In these times," he says, "a good humanitarian leader that really brings people together would make a big difference. And obviously there's none of that going on."

To put it mildly, Sánchez is not a big fan of President Donald J. Trump. He's full-voiced with his criticism on social media , and has now found a musical outlet for it: Sánchez's new album is Bad Hombre (CAM Jazz), a solo drums-and-electronics odyssey that functions in one sense as his follow-up to the award-winning Birdman score.

In another sense, of course, Bad Hombre is a rejoinder to then-candidate Trump's infamous quip last year about undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States: "We have some bad hombres here, and we're going to get them out." The line stirred up outrage and ridicule, but for Sánchez it also rang the alarm.

"It's been a long road, immigration-wise, for me," he says, recalling a succession of bureaucratic hurdles stretching back to the early 1990s, when he was studying at the Berklee College of Music. After years of dutiful visa renewals, he received a green card in 2007. He finally secured his American citizenship last fall, just in time to cast his first vote in a presidential election.

Sánchez will play a trio set Wednesday at the La Paz Jazz Festival on the Baja peninsula. Then he'll return to the states to perform live Birdman screenings on Friday, at the AT&T Center in Dallas, and on Oct. 9, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He says he's still puzzling over how to adapt Bad Hombre to a live performance setting. For now, the album is a world unto itself — albeit one that holds a funhouse mirror to our own.

Nate Chinen: It was a stray remark from one of the presidential debates last year that gives your album its title. How were you specifically motivated by the idea of someone in power who has said inflammatory things about Mexicans?

Antonio Sánchez: The music is definitely influenced by it, in the sense that it's a somewhat dark album that was conceived first during the election cycle and then after he won. So it's a very personal thing that I feel, obviously because of what you mentioned. He really took it upon himself to go after Mexicans right off the bat, with absolutely no provocation at all, when he announced his candidacy. And it's just been downhill from there.

You recently bought a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and I read somewhere that the establishment of a home studio was integral to being able to make this album.

I don't think I would have been able to pull this off without that studio. When I realized how much time I spent on it, and how much more relaxed I was — like, I'm not running against the clock. I would record a bunch of drums, then work on the electronic sounds on the road, and then again when I got back home. So it was an on-and-off process, but it wouldn't have happened without this amazing lab I was able to build in the basement of our house.

It's interesting to think about this album as an electronic project of sorts. It's not a drums-first record all the time. Was that something you set about to do after the explicitly percussive nature of Birdman ?

I wanted to find a balance between soloing, playing really busy, and then having enough electronic content that would make the sonority of the album something different. The juxtaposition of the acoustic drums with the all-electronic background, that's what was interesting about this whole thing. I was completely improvising on the drums, without thinking too much. I would improvise on one particular vibe for hours. Then once I had enough material, I would start splicing it, editing it, trying to condense a few hours of improvisation into seven minutes or so. Sometimes I would actually be editing the drum tracks and adding electronics as I went along — kind of discovering the story of each tune as I went along.

Were there any specific sources of musical inspiration for this album?

Not really, but I was listening to a lot of music that probably influenced me in some ways. I'm a big fan of Hiatus Kaiyote , the Australian band — and even though they're not an electronic band, they have a lot of electronic elements. I was listening to some Boards of Canada , Aphex Twin . Bonobo . Little Dragon . All these bands that have very rich production value. But a lot of them don't really have real drums.

Right, I was about to say that you just named some really celebrated drum programmers.

Exactly. So I think if I would have made this record exactly the way it is and then programmed some drums, the sonority of the whole thing would have been completely different. But just the fact that it's jazz drums with jazz cymbals ... and of course I tweaked the sound quite a bit, and I was able to experiment with different techniques. So, things like: "OK, what would it sound like if I put a T-shirt on the drums and then a cymbal on top and then I tape it to the side of the drum, and then I move the mic a little bit and then I hit it with something different from a stick?" All of a sudden, I was discovering all these sonic possibilities that I'd never been able to put on tape before.

You open the album with a corrido and a recitation by your grandfather, the celebrated actor Ignacio López Tarso, who is now 92. Was that an immediate thought for you? Like: "If we're going to talk bad hombres, let me find the baddest hombre I know"?

To begin the record, I wanted something that was inherently Mexican, no mistaking it. My grandfather came to mind, and I thought about having his voice in there, and then a mariachi band, and my drums on top with some electronics. That was something that at least for me would be completely new and different. I found this corrido that I love, "Benito Canales," and it turned out it was in the same key as this groove that I had already done. And it really moved me to have the voice of my grandfather. Immediately I thought, "Well, he's the ultimate bad hombre." He's such an example of a Mexican that is incredibly hardworking, supported his whole family doing what he loved, which is acting. He changed acting in Mexico. That just really rounded out the whole concept for me.

Was his artistry, and his eminent stature, a source of inspiration to you back when you were forming your identity?

Oh, absolutely. I grew up going to rehearsals, and he would bring whole theater companies to lunch at home. I love the show business side of it. Acting never really interested me, because I was playing drums already. We did a pilot together, I must have been seven. It was a traveling circus, but even in the pilot I was already playing drums: it was a circus story, and in the circus I had a little snare drum, and was playing behind some of the acrobats. Really the main thing that happened from seeing him in action was being inspired to pursue what I wanted to do. Seeing him be so successful, so well respected, so revered, and financially he was always well off. He accomplished a lot. So for me to see that firsthand was a very powerful image, and made me want to go for it.

And now you're someone who is celebrated when you return home. How has that evolved?

Back in 2002 I played here with the Pat Metheny Group. It was the only time the group played here, and it was a huge deal because Pat had never been here. Then I came back in 2003 with my own trio; I brought [saxophonist] David Sánchez and [bassist] Reuben Rogers to this beautiful theater. Those things established me a little bit in people's consciousness: This guy is good, and he's doing some stuff that no other Mexican has been able to do before. So every other year, I would come and do something with different bands. I have a few friends who are promoters. But after Birdman ... because Iñárritu is also Mexican, it had big consequences in the press. And because my name was attached to the project, by default I ended up getting a lot of good rep because of that. Seeing how much it changed after Birdman was kind of shocking. Now I can come and do anything I want and usually people are behind me.

You can trace a clear line from the Birdman soundtrack to Bad Hombre , but the previous album and project you put together, The Meridian Suite , was an ambitious longform composition for jazz ensemble. Will you pursue both paths, going forward?

I cannot see myself leaving either one of those, because I'm really both things at the same time. I cannot satisfy my compositional ambitions in a project like Bad Hombre , and I cannot fulfill these other, more experimental ambitions with my band, at least so far. I really admire people that have a long and varied discography. I'm very interested in that, and exploring all kinds of different paths that I have in my head. The next project is a big band record of my music arranged by Vince Mendoza, with the WDR Orchestra in Cologne. It's finished, and should come out on CAM Jazz in March. I like it when each record is completely different from the previous one.

That's a big swing of the pendulum, from solo drums and electronics to Vince Mendoza orchestrations. To swing it back to Bad Hombre : What would you say to someone who raises an eyebrow to the outspoken statement behind this album?

Artists usually transform what's going on in life and then put it into our work. Art is a reflection of life. And it would have been incredibly hard for me to ignore what has been happening and just make a record that has absolutely nothing to do with the political and social climate that we're living in the States. Especially because of my Mexican origin. A lot of people write to me on Facebook, and some of them say "I love your drumming but your politics suck. I wish you would not use your platform to plug your political views." To them I always say: "Precisely because I have a platform, I'm going to use it to say what I think." I think it's incredibly important for me, for other musicians, to not normalize the situation. Not stay quiet and just do my music. I am from Mexico, I'm a minority, I'm brown. I can't help but be influenced in a really, really big way by everything that's going on. If this album creates a small platform for me to be able to talk about it, that was basically the idea.

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Meet the Real ‘Bad Hombres’

In 2016 while running for president, Donald Trump vowed to rid America of ‘bad hombres.’ In the three years since, restaurants, punk bands, magazines and others have adopted the smear as a badge of honor — and the name of their ventures.

Donald Trump has said so many ridiculous, offensive things that, in our collective memory, they tend to coalesce into an amorphous litany of inanity. But some comments are more galling than others — and sometimes they get absorbed into the culture, taking on a life of their own.  

One such example came during the third presidential debate, on October 19, 2016, when Trump was talking up his idea for a stronger border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. This was hardly the first time Trump had picked on Mexicans — a year earlier, when he was starting his campaign, he delivered his infamous “They’re not sending their best” speech — but standing beside his opponent Hillary Clinton, he warned of the need to protect America from its southern neighbors: 

“We’re going to secure the border, and once the border is secured at a later date, we’ll make a determination as to the rest,” Trump declared. “But we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”

Hearing Trump try to American-ize the phrase “bad hombres” was darkly comic, but soon after, something interesting started to happen. I began noticing that people were adopting “bad hombres” as a personal moniker, almost as a badge of honor. Trump had meant it as a putdown, but it was morphing into a form of ironic self-identification. (A Mexican-American friend mentioned she proudly drinks from a coffee mug that reads, “All my friends are bad hombres and nasty women” — a reference to the other snide comment Trump made during the same debate.) 

Turns out, “bad hombres” is big business: The phrase has become the name of so many different entities, each of them capitalizing and commenting on Trump’s racism.  

Curious about what motivates someone to choose “bad hombres,” I reached out to those around the globe who use the phrase as the name of their enterprise. I spoke to a Glasgow punk band. I emailed with a Dutch documentarian who has lived in Nicaragua for more than a decade. I chatted with a Mexican-American comic whose latest tour is titled “Bad Hambre” because he loves eating so much. All told, six individuals — from New York to Mexico City to Sydney to L.A. — explained why they’ve chosen to identify with “bad hombre.” Along the way, we also talked about their feelings on Trump, immigration and whether they think they’ve removed the stigma from the phrase by coopting it. 

President Trump tries to marginalize groups and individuals — my six interview subjects would seem to have little in common — but they’re unconsciously bonded by their embrace of the same two words: Bad hombres .

Bad Hombre , Men’s Fashion Magazine, Mexico City

Growing up, Juan Pablo Jim spent a lot of time in the U.S. “I was born in Mexico City, and I did my whole education here,” he tells me. “But I have family that lives in San Diego and Virginia, and my grandfather worked in New York. So as kids, my brother and I came to the U.S. many times. There was this image, in the 1990s, that America was the land of opportunity. It was so diverse, especially in the big cities. When you went to San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it was so welcoming for Mexicans. We went to Texas a lot as kids, too, and even Texas felt welcoming.”

Jim is currently in Mexico City, back from a recent business trip to L.A. The 32-year-old is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Bad Hombre , a magazine that advertises itself as “Fashion for the thinking man.” When the publication started in 2017, Jim and his creative team pondered what to name it. “It was about six months after President Trump said what he said about bad hombres,” he recalls. “I guess it came about as a joke: ‘Why don’t we call the magazine Bad Hombre ?’ But we weren’t political at all in the sense that we never represent a specific point-of-view about immigration or economics.” 

Nonetheless, they quickly realized how fitting that moniker would be — after all, Jim wanted his nascent publication to represent the state of the modern Mexican man. “It’s all Mexican men who are on the cover,” he explains. “It’s mostly Mexican men who are doing the magazine, although of course there are women working with us, but the team back then was mostly male. So it was a bunch of Mexican men who are creative, talented and doing something [positive] for the country. It was a little bit ironic, then, that someone who’s not from our country was calling us ‘bad hombres’ when not all Mexicans are rapists or stealing things or whatever the connotations of his comments were.”

View this post on Instagram Sí, hace frío pero no impide que sigamos teniendo estilo ? #BADHOMBREMag – Look @lacoste – Editor de moda @danielvasquez.g Fotografía @elesdanieljauregui Grooming @antaravd A post shared by Bad Hombre Magazine (@badhombremag) on Oct 18, 2019 at 11:55am PDT

It should be noted that Bad Hombre doesn’t just feature men — Jim has interviewed Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira , the stars of the Oscar-winning Mexican drama Roma — but it’s driven by its editor’s desire to understand how Mexican males are navigating life in the era of #MeToo. “The team has worked very hard to feature as many diverse men as we can in the magazine — also, the ones that represent the modernity of the country,” he says. “When I go out to other parts of the world, and I tell them I’m from Mexico, they will say, ‘I love Narcos !’ That’s what people think of Mexico.” 

“So if I put a telenovela star or film star [on the cover], we always try to find the modernity in them,” he continues. “I’m really not interested in their career because I could Google that. We try to ask them about their viewpoint on the fluidity of the male gender, what their biggest fears are or what is their relationship with their father? That’s become the trademark of Bad Hombre . I’m trying to analyze the B-side of their story.”

“The modern Mexican man is having a harder time coming out of his shell and being honest about the things that he likes and being more true to himself,” adds Jim. “Especially in provinces or smaller towns, there’s a harder barrier because of the cultural upbringing — Latino men, especially in Mexico, [think they] need to be very macho about everything they do. There’s also huge Catholic guilt [against] going out and being free — and I don’t even mean sexually diverse. There’s this guilt to marry young and have a job or [be a] provider for your family, and that women aren’t supposed to work. There’s this cultural construction we have in Mexico, because of our Latino plus Catholic upbringing, that I feel makes it harder for our modern men to break free than if they were in some other countries.”

View this post on Instagram Octubre nos invita a analizar lo que somos, nuestro poder y fortalezas. Octubre nos invita a analizar #WhatMakesAMan con el medallista invernal @arlyvelasquez y la conductora @vanehupp ?? – – Total looks @zegnaofficial – – Director creativo @alejandroperegrina1 Fotografía @lanznake Estilismo @prisscano Makeup y grooming @gusbortolotti Diseño @fran_bahena Editor in chief @jimness A post shared by Bad Hombre Magazine (@badhombremag) on Oct 1, 2019 at 11:49am PDT

As for Trump, his feelings are measured. “As Mexicans, it’s not really our place to be commenting on whether we approve or not,” he says. “We weren’t part of the election process. But as the leader of the free world, of course it affects us. I’m very close to the U.S. — I have family that lives there, and I traveled there most of my life because it’s so close. I also do a lot of business with brands that are from America. So I can say that it’s a little embarrassing that the representative for people that I care about — people that I love and work with in a country that I love — is so close-minded.”

View this post on Instagram José José será interpretado por @alexdelamadrid en la nueva serie biográfica del recién fallecido cantante, hablamos con él sobre su estilo en una editorial disponible ya mismo en nuestro #linkinbio – – Look @lobmoda y @galobertin – Producción y estilismo @steponfashion Editor de moda @danielvasquez.g Foto @sergio.valenzuelach A post shared by Bad Hombre Magazine (@badhombremag) on Oct 7, 2019 at 4:48pm PDT

To that end, one of Jim’s initial reservations about naming his magazine Bad Hombre was that he didn’t want people Googling the publication and finding Trump’s comments first. But as Bad Hombre ’s profile has risen, Jim has felt better and better about the name. “It feels very right,” he tells me. “If you analyze that [phrase], which is representative of the modern man, a cultured man, a man that’s doing something for his country, then it’s very fitting. I mean, it’s almost ironic that [the magazine] is called Bad Hombre when the origin of that phrase was a completely different version of the Mexican man.”

It’s also nice that Bad Hombre has established its own reputation beyond Trump. “If you were to come to Mexico City, or Mexico in general, and just say the phrase ‘bad hombre’ to someone who works in the industry, the first association would be the magazine and not Mr. Trump’s comments,” Jim explains. “So I guess we’re doing a good job at changing the storyline.”

Bad Hombre , 2017 Album by Antonio Sánchez

Sanchez wasn’t even thinking about making a record when the impulse to try out some new musical ideas started forming. “I was just messing around while doing other things,” the drummer tells me. “I thought, ‘This will probably become something at some point,’ but I wasn’t giving it too much thought.”

Sánchez, who turns 48 next week and lives in New York, grew up in a well-to-do family in Mexico City. He’s been playing drums since he was a boy, jamming with everyone from the Pat Metheny Group to Chick Corea — he also composed the score for fellow Mexican artist Alejandro G. Iñárritu ’s Oscar-winning Birdman — but when he works on solo projects, he doesn’t necessarily enter into them with a clear concept. “Usually I sit at the piano and come up with melodies, harmonies or rhythms,” he says. “But in this particular instance, I just sat at the drums and started improvising. When you improvise, it’s a very subconscious thing — you don’t really have time to think. But because it’s all subconscious, whatever it is that you’re carrying with you at the moment slowly comes to the surface.”

What came to the surface when recording the material that would become Bad Hombre , his 2017 instrumental, percussive record, was Sánchez’s feelings about the new president. “I was devouring news at the same time I was recording at home. I’d be in the living room upstairs, watching the news and then go downstairs and record. So after a while of doing this process every day — and then listening to what I’d recorded — it became clear to me that there was a lot of angst, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration that was coming through my playing. Drums are the perfect instrument for that, because you just beat the crap out of ‘em.”

Similarly, Sánchez still remembers where he was when he heard Trump say “bad hombres.” As he tells me, “I was at home, and like a lot of people, I was flabbergasted by what I’d just heard. My hands were incredibly sweaty and clammy. Even before Donald Trump became president, his demeanor always made me uncomfortable. He’s such an incredibly condescending person.”   

Because Bad Hombre is instrumental — it received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album — the casual listener might not necessarily know that the music was inspired by Sánchez’s rage at Trump. That’s partly why Sánchez chose to title the album Bad Hombre — and to write the record’s pointed liner notes, although he refused to mention Trump by name.  

“I feel like he doesn’t need any more publicity,” Sánchez says. “I feel like the people that really need the attention are those people who are suffering because of him, which in this case are immigrants and minorities. I come from Mexico City, and I know how hard it was for me to come here and do it legally — and I come from a very well-established, privileged family. Whenever I hear people say, ‘Well, you know, what we don’t like is illegal immigration — so, everybody, just go back to their country, apply and then come here legally,’ that really pisses me off. They have no idea what they’re talking about and how rigged the system is for people who don’t have enough resources.”

“Obviously there’s a lot of Latinos that follow me and follow my music,” he continues. “So, to me, it’s important to always set the example of a Mexican that’s in the United States and is hopefully viewed as somebody successful that’s doing the right thing. That’s basically what I was trying to say with the album. There are incredibly capable Mexican people residing in the States. We pay our fair share of taxes — we actually pay way more taxes comparatively to Donald Trump.”

He refuses to stop being outspoken, too. His 2019 album, Lines in the Sand , was inspired by stories of migrants coming into the U.S . The record features a track called “Bad Hombres y Mujeres” and is even more explicit in its fury. “[At the start of the album], I put a collage together of people being stopped by immigration police, being separated from their families,” he tells me. “I grabbed audio from a lot of those instances and put it into a collage.”

In that way, making music is as much a means of catharsis as it is expressing rage. Or as he puts it, “If I didn’t do it, I’m sure I’d be absolutely out of my mind.”

Bad Hombres , 2017 Documentary Directed by Stef Biemans  

Blame it on love: If Biemans hadn’t become so enamored with the woman who would eventually become his wife, he might never have made a documentary about the immigrant experience. “Twenty years ago I fell in love with a Nicaraguan girl,” the early-40s Dutch journalist writes over email. “She didn’t want [to] leave her country, so I decided to live in Nicaragua to be able to marry her.” 

Biemans had been a longtime contributor to VPRO , a Dutch public broadcasting company, reporting on news and current affairs. In that capacity, he’d made documentaries about Latin American issues, but it was during his time in Central America that he began to get a sense of what the U.S. represented to people who lived in that part of the globe.

“I’ve heard many people dreaming of a life up north, in la unite ,” Biemans explains. “We’ve said goodbye to some friends who decided to take the chance [to migrate to America] and have [welcomed] back those who didn’t make it. The ones who did were considered [the] heroes of their town. Not only for sending money back home, but also to have the physical strength to make it through Mexico and the desert.”

And so, the idea for a documentary started to develop: What if he chronicled a popular immigration route, from Guatemala to the U.S., talking to the people he met along the way? The timing felt perfect in the wake of Trump’s presidential victory, and so, it seemed obvious that he should call his film Bad Hombres .

“The people around me were in shock,” he says of the response he observed when Trump made his “bad hombres” comment. “This pure kind of racism seemed to be outdated, something that didn’t happen anymore. They all knew he was talking about Mexicans, but as all Latinos feel like brothers, for them it felt he was talking about the 500 million Latin Americans in general. They were very offended.”

The 54-minute documentary, available on Amazon Prime , aims to humanize the faceless immigrants we see in news clips, allowing them to express why they’ll risk everything to reach the States. Biemans’ lens is compassionate, introducing us to a Guatemalan family seeking a visa so that the kids can visit Disneyland, a few young Mexicans crossing the U.S. border illegally and an American woman who lovingly collects the belongings that migrants leave behind as they brave their journey across the Sonoran Desert . But there’s also plenty of muted anger — Biemans barely contains his disgust at meeting a racist American militant who proudly flies a flag with a swastika but swears he’s not a Nazi — that’s embodied in the film’s sarcastic title.

“I thought it would be ironic to show the kind of people [Trump] talked about, with my subjective vision of being on their side, and naming the film after such a negative comment,” he says. Biemans only references the U.S. president once in Bad Hombres — tellingly, it’s a Trump piñata that a group of children happily pummel with sticks — but as he tells me, “[I] do let the audience feel that things are changing with his politics.”

And, of course, Biemans himself, hasn’t stopped thinking about who Trump is, or what he represents. “I think he’s a [showbiz] man. His ignorance and greed is causing a lot of harm. When there’s a president who is doing wrong, you can see how much power the U.S. actually [has]. He has so much influence, just by being in the news. He knows how to draw attention, in a very simple, reality show-like way. Sometimes it feels I am watching The Apprentice . As if he decided: I did well there, let’s just keep on doing that and stick to the role . I simply can’t believe he is actually himself. It must be some kind of role he is playing.”

On a more personal note, Biemans has gained an even greater appreciation for the immigrant struggle recently. “My wife and I had to [flee] Nicaragua because of the wave of violent repression of the Ortega regime ,” Biemans writes. “Living abroad, and having to start over, I suddenly relate to the migrants that we filmed for Bad Hombres more than ever.”

Bad Hombres, Mexican Restaurant, Sydney, Australia

Jose Artidiello imagines he’ll move back to Mexico some day. He still has family there — he grew up in Mexico City — but for the last 13 years, his life has been halfway around the world in Sydney. It just worked out that way. Sort of like how he’s currently the general manager of Bad Hombres , the city’s only plant-based authentically Mexican vegan restaurant.  

The 30-year-old ventured to Sydney to study economics — his father, who’s now retired, worked in finance for the Mexican government — and eventually got a job working in hospitality. “I worked for one of the most famous Mexican chains in Sydney, Guzman y Gomez , which is basically like Chipotle,” he says. “When I first moved here, they’d just opened their first store, so I worked with them for a few years. That gave me a hint that there was a possibility to keep going in a different direction.”

He moved on to helping develop concepts for cocktail bars before hooking up with a business partner from the U.K. “We worked together for a few years at a bar before we went our separate ways,” he recalls. “He moved to Queensland , and I stayed here in Sydney. Then he came up with this opportunity to start this business because of connections he still had in Sydney.”

The proposed business was a Mexican restaurant. Coming up with a name was a challenge. “We started almost three years ago now,” Artidiello tells me, “and it was kind of in the middle of [Trump’s] presidential campaign. When we started, we knew we wanted to do something Mexican — we just didn’t know what to name it. But it happened organically because he was making all these comments about the Latin American community, and we were like, ‘Okay, let’s adjust what he’s saying in a fun way. We’re bad hombres.’ So our motto is, ‘Bad Hombres, Good Food.’”

View this post on Instagram Everyday is Taco day at @bad.hombres.dining ??✌?#tacotuesday A post shared by B A D H O M B R E S (@bad.hombres.dining) on Oct 8, 2019 at 12:04am PDT

Still, Bad Hombres struggled at first — not because patrons objected to the name, but because Artidiello and his partners hadn’t hit upon the proper approach to their cuisine. “We actually started as contemporary Mexican,” he says. “The first three months we were just doing Mexican food. But that was already a saturated market — there were already very big names with a lot of capital behind them. We were just small guys with not much money. So we were like, ‘We needed something to separate ourselves from the rest.’ We had a guy involved in the group that was vegan, and he’s the one who came up with the idea of maybe turning it plant-based. Once that happened, Bad Hombres took off.”

According to the 2006 census, Latinos constituted less than one percent of the Australian population . But in recent years, immigration has increased Down Under, particularly from Mexico. A   2011 Sydney Morning Herald piece quotes immigration agent Nicholas Houston, who said, “There is a wave of fear that is causing many middle-class Mexicans to look at getting out,” citing the rash of violence due to Mexico’s drug wars. “We’ve seen a 30 percent increase in inquiries in the past six months. Currently we assist 50 to 60 families to migrate from Mexico every year. We get thousands of inquiries.”

That’s not why Artidiello moved — his family is upper-middle-class — but he noticed that he arrived during a Latino influx. “I came at the time where this Latin American diaspora was just starting to arrive to Australia,” he says. “Nowadays, there’s a huge Brazilian [contingent], Colombian, South American especially.” As opposed to traveling to America, “with all the restrictions that people would have,” Australia seems more inviting. “[Immigrants] can try to get a student visa and come over.”

View this post on Instagram WEEKEND APPROACHING⚠️ still a few tables left online – grab one while you can ??‍♂️? www.badhombres.com.au/book A post shared by B A D H O M B R E S (@bad.hombres.dining) on Sep 25, 2019 at 4:46am PDT

In terms of Trump, when Artidiello talks to his family back home, neither the president nor immigration comes up much. And when tourists visit his restaurant — from America or elsewhere — they tend to appreciate the satiric name. “The people who travel more, they’re the ones who will be more inclined to be against [his] policies,” he tells me, later adding, “I think [Americans] kind of feel embarrassed. [Trump] is like that uncle that always ruins the party.”

Bad Hombres, Glasgow Punk Band

Jack Conlon has been to America once, back when he was eight or nine. It was a family trip, traveling all the way from his hometown of Glasgow to see Disney World in Florida. He had a good time, but now, as the 23-year-old front man of the punk rock group Bad Hombres , he admits he’d be a little wary about returning to the States.

“There’s almost that fascist element, which is also prevalent in the U.K. at the minute, but it almost seems as if it’s more so in America,” he tells me. “The whole issue over gun violence puts a lot of people off going over on holiday to visit the U.S. From a Scottish perspective, it looks like a scary place to live. But, of course, there’s so many great things about America that you need to take loads of things into consideration.”

You probably haven’t heard of Conlon’s band. Bad Hombres have a pretty small following on Spotify , with just a few singles and an EP to their credit. But they’re still relatively new — they didn’t form until a couple years ago, when they had to figure out what they were going to call themselves. “As what happens with any other band, you look about for names and try to find the right one that fits your style and ethos.” It was their drummer, Innes McGarry, who first proposed Bad Hombres.

“This is maybe late 2016 and roughly about the time Donald Trump was voted in as president,” Conlon recalls, “and we were quite scared, frankly. The U.K. and America have been historically great friends, but we were really concerned about what we were seeing. We saw the rise of Donald Trump and the right in America as having a lot in common with the rising fascism in certain parts of Europe, so we were terrified at the prospect of that. And Innes, jokingly, said one day, ‘Why don’t we use Bad Hombres?’ We laughed at first, but the more we thought about it, the more it made sense to us.”  

Conlon and the band’s other three members — Innes, Paul Duff and Brendan Cairney — are all 23, all from Glasgow, all raised Catholic and all white. Initially, they were worried that potential fans might think they were pro-Trump, but they weren’t concerned about being accused of minimizing the racism of his comment by turning it into an ironic band name. “We wanted to mock him by using the term,” Conlon explains. “It was also to show solidarity with the so-called ‘bad hombres’ that Trump was targeting — all the immigrants that he wasn’t happy [were] coming into the U.S.A. We wanted to show solidarity with them and basically say, ‘Hey, we’re all bad hombres to an extent. This guy has no right to call you that, but we’ll use it as a positive force for good.’”

The group hadn’t intended on writing political music when they formed. But they found that they couldn’t help themselves. “It was terrifying to see that there was such support for someone who has the most abhorrent, horrid views of probably any political leader in Western civilization,” says Conlon, whose band’s EP from earlier this year is called Protest As You Please . One of their earliest tracks was “Manuel,” a snarling rock song about, as Conlon puts it, “an immigrant who comes over from Russia. It’s a woman, but she’s masquerading as Manuel, and she basically terrorizes the country just by being there. We were taking all these sentiments that immigrants are detrimental to society — they leech off the government and all the rest of it — and taking the piss out of it.”

Scotland has hardly been immune to the xenophobic tendencies that have crept up in the U.S. and elsewhere. Conlon’s political awakening coincided with the country’s independence referendum of 2014 , which found Scottish citizens voting whether to become an independent nation. (“No” won with 55 percent of the vote.) The day after the election, Conlon saw anti-Irish sentiments in the celebrations around Glasgow, which saddened him. “It was disgusting,” he recalls. “I grew up a Catholic, and so did the rest of the guys in the band. We were made to feel very unwelcome.”

Conlon also recently graduated from university with a degree in politics and international relations. While he was in school, Scotland’s independence referendum, Brexit and Trump’s election occurred in quick succession. (“It was certainly the focal point of many of our sober and drunken discussions,” he notes wryly.) As such, Conlon says he and the band didn’t feel like they needed to read up on Trump’s immigration policy — or the plight of immigrants coming to the U.S. — to call themselves Bad Hombres.

“We knew a lot about the [immigration] issue at the time,” he says, “and obviously we know a lot about U.K. immigration. But it wasn’t important to us to learn about the very detailed inner workings of immigration policy in America because I don’t actually think that’s what Trump was talking about in the first place. He just spotted this resentment over what was going on in America at the time, and he basically offered immigrants as the scapegoat. He said, ‘This is who the problem is. These guys are causing all your economic hardships.’”

Given his interest in politics, might he consider running for office later in life? “I’m not sure,” he replies. “I don’t think I’d ever rule it out, but it’s hard because obviously I’m hoping I’ve got a future with [music]. If that doesn’t work out, then I’ve always wanted to get into teaching politics and helping to shape and mold the minds of the future. Politics, I don’t know. At the moment, probably not, but hopefully there’s going to be some brighter times ahead for both America and the U.K.”

He pauses. “Although you could argue there is no better time to get involved in terms of wanting to protect minority groups and impact a positive change. So you never know.”

The Bad Hambre Tour , Felipe Esparza, Stand-Up Comic

What a difference a letter makes. Forty-three-year-old stand-up Felipe Esparza was plotting his next tour, trying to decide on a name. “I wanted to find a funny title,” he tells me. “So I said, ‘How about Bad Hombre ?’ And my wife said, ‘Nah, you don’t do any political jokes.’ Then I thought about that, in Spanish comedy, there’s a lot of play-on-words, like double meanings and double entendres. I said, ‘Let’s call it Bad Hambre ,’” which means “hungry” in Spanish.

The pun is appropriate for a comic who describes himself thusly: “I’m big. I’m fat. I weigh 290 pounds. So I got bad hunger.” In his stand-up, he’s just as forthcoming, riffing honestly on everything from his family to his past drug addiction.

Esparza remembers when he heard Trump’s “bad hombres” comment. “I thought it was funny, man. It sounded like when John Wayne was trying to pronounce a Spanish word.” That said, he wasn’t angered by it. “I’m a stand-up comedian, so I try to find humor in everything. I wasn’t offended — I laughed. When he said that Mexicans are rapists and violent people, I laughed, because when you go to Disneyland, the Midwest is [sending] their worst — their overweight people, their inbred. There’s nobody at Disneyland who is white who is in shape.”

Born in Mexico, Esparza moved to Pico Gardens in L.A. when he was four. He still recalls some of his Mexican childhood — how his tiny rural town reminded him of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz , how they’d watch movies in an outdoor amphitheater with stone seats. “I looked up, and there was no ceiling, man,” he says fondly. “There was no roof — you could see the stars. You could see a plane pass by when you were watching the movie. Yeah, man, it was crazy.”

His father made his way to the U.S. before the rest of the family. “My dad had nothing when he came to America,” Esparza tells me. “He just wanted a new life.” His dad was fortunate, though, to have siblings already living in the States, who hooked him up with a job pressing albums for L.A. record labels, which paved the way for Esparza and the family to move as well. “If you have a strong base, like a family here already, you’re going to survive,” he says of the immigrant experience. “These people that are coming now to America, they’re not even coming from Mexico. They’re coming from Honduras, Venezuela. If you don’t have a family member helping you out or someone that’s been here already, it’s going to be tough.”

Although Esparza is proud of his Mexican heritage — on tour, he’ll do the occasional all-Spanish show — he gets frustrated when immigration jokes that used to get laughs long before Trump entered the political landscape now receive a cooler reaction from audiences. “Now when people hear them, they get offended. I’m like, ‘Wow, times have changed.’” Blame it on so-called political correctness, perhaps, but for Esparza, the annoyance runs deeper. “The people who are sensitive aren’t doing anything about it,” he argues. “They’re just sensitive to be sensitive. They’re not doing what needs to be done. They’re not out there raising money to pay the lawyers who are doing these immigration cases pro bono. Nobody is posting about these people who are taking on immigration cases for free.”

Esparza’s frankness is ingrained into his comedy — he won Last Comic Standing back in 2010 — but it also seems to stem from his own upbringing watching different Latino groups make fun of other Latino groups. “When [Trump] said that stuff about Mexicans, my father has said the same thing about Salvadorian people or any other Latino group that’s not Mexican.” For Esparza, non-Latinos have such a shallow understanding of other cultures, largely because of how little they’re represented on television. “In 50 years of television, there’s only been, like, four sitcoms that have Latin Americans in it,” he tells me. “In America, when they think about Mexicans, all they think about is a Mexican who just got here illegally. Mexican-Americans — the people that have been here forever, the people that are here legally for over 100 years who don’t speak Spanish — that part of our culture has never been shown on television. But white people, they have so much representation on television — we know that a redneck is different from a regular white guy.”

Not that he spends a lot of time thinking about Trump. “I’m not on the internet like some people,” he says. “They go on the internet and they go see what Trump did, or they start picking a fight with somebody. I don’t have time for that, man.” 

Plus, he says, “When I talk about myself, whether it’s about immigration or a bad experience with a police officer, I’m telling my story. Some people will say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about being Mexican.’ And I say, ‘Well, man, that’s all I know.’”

Tim Grierson

Tim Grierson is a contributing editor at MEL. He writes about film and pop culture for Screen International, Rolling Stone and Vulture.

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Embracing an irreverent yet convivial vibe, this restaurant beckons everyone from people celebrating birthdays and anniversaries to friends, couples and avid food enthusiasts.

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Bad Bunny announces 2024 Most Wanted Tour: Here's how to get tickets, when he's performing

Less than a week after Bad Bunny released a new album , the reggaeton superstar has dropped the dates for his 2024 tour .

The Puerto Rican rapper and singer will kick off his four-month, 31-city Most Wanted Tour on Feb. 21 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The tour stops for multiple shows in several major cities including Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix, then ending with three consecutive shows in Miami.

Bad Bunny, born  Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio ,  set records on his 2022 tours becoming the only artist in history to put on two separate $100-million tours in less than 12 months with his El Último Tour Del Mundo and World’s Hottest Tour.

Bad Bunny and Kendall Jenner: Couple goes Instagram official with joint Gucci campaign

The 29-year-old performer on Friday released his fifth studio album, "nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana." His latest album made history as it became the most-streamed album in a single day in 2023 so far on Spotify.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Earlier this month, he took home several top honors at the 2023 Billboard Latin Music Awards , including artist of the year.

How can I get tickets to see Bad Bunny?

If you want to catch the Most Wanted Tour, register online on Ticketmaster through Sunday, Oct. 22 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Registration doesn't guarantee tickets, but it will "help block bots and scalpers, reduce resale and get more tickets directly into the hands of real people who want to attend the show," according to a press release about the tour.

After registering, you will get an email confirming your registration within 24 hours. Then, on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 24, randomly selected persons who registered will get a second email telling them if they were selected to get access to the Wednesday, Oct. 25 sale or if they were waitlisted for tickets. 

Those selected will get a unique access code to use when buying tickets. If waitlisted, you might still have a shot later if any tickets remain. There are also VIP packages with premium tickets and other perks at vipnation.com .

Here are Bad Bunny's 2024 Most Wanted Tour dates

Follow Mike Snider on X and Threads:  @mikesnider  & mikegsnider .

What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day

La causa de la muerte del golfista Grayson Murray tras haberse retirado el viernes de un torneo del PGA Tour

Los padres comunicaron que el jugador se suicidó; tenía problemas relacionados con el alcoholismo.

Los padres del golfista profesional Grayson Murray dijeron este domingo que el doble ganador del PGA Tour se suicidó el sábado por la mañana. “Hemos pasado las últimas 24 horas tratando de aceptar el hecho de que nuestro hijo se ha ido”, reflejaron Eric y Terry Murray en un comunicado. “Es surrealista que no sólo tengamos que admitirlo ante nosotros mismos, sino que también tengamos que reconocerlo ante el mundo. Es una pesadilla... La vida no siempre fue fácil para Grayson, y aunque se quitó la vida, sabemos que ahora descansa en paz”.

Grayson Murray, de 30 años, se retiró del Charles Schwab Challenge en Colonial después del hoyo 16 de la segunda vuelta del viernes en Fort Worth, Texas. El PGA Tour citó el motivo como una enfermedad.

“Tenemos tantas preguntas que no tienen respuesta. Pero una: ¿Amaban a Grayson? La respuesta es sí”, dijeron sus padres en su comunicado. “Por nosotros, su hermano Cameron, su hermana Erica, toda su familia extendida, sus amigos, sus compañeros jugadores y, al parecer, muchos de ustedes que están leyendo esto. Fue amado y lo extrañaremos”.

“Nos gustaría agradecer al PGA Tour y a todo el mundo del golf por el gran apoyo. Respeten nuestra privacidad mientras trabajamos en esta increíble tragedia y honren a Grayson siendo amables unos con otros. Si eso se convierte en su legado, No podemos pedir nada más”.

Murray habló sobre el alcohol y la salud mental en el pasado, diciendo que solía beber durante las semanas del torneo cuando era novato porque sabía que tenía talento y se sentía invencible. Dio un gran giro este año y ganó el Sony Open, pegando con un wedge y dejándose un putt de 3 pies para birdie en el último hoyo para llegar a un desempate, que terminó ganando con un putt de 40 pies.

“Me tomó mucho tiempo llegar a este punto”, había señalado Murray en enero. “Eso fue hace siete años, hace más de siete años. Ahora soy un hombre diferente. No estaría en esta posición hoy si no hubiera dejado esa bebida hace ocho meses”. Su primera coronación en el PGA Tour había diso Campeonato Barbasol como novato del PGA Tour de 22 años en 2017.

Murray, que ocupaba el puesto 58 en el ranking mundial, venía de un empate en el 43° lugar en el PGA Championship en Valhalla. También pasó el corte en su debut en el Masters, terminando en el puesto 51°, y estaba inscripto para el US Open del próximo mes en Pinehurst No. 2.

JUST IN: The parents of PGA tour golfer Grayson Murray have confirmed that their son took his own life. Murray took his life after he withdrew on Friday during the second round of the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge. “We would like to thank the PGA Tour and the entire world of… pic.twitter.com/bBeZiAJdbI — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 26, 2024

El jugador, que creció en Carolina del Norte, estaba entre los jóvenes más talentosos del país. Ganó el prestigioso Campeonato Mundial Juvenil en San Diego tres años consecutivos y obtuvo la Beca Arnold Palmer en Wake Forest. Terminó asistiendo a tres universidades, finalmente a la estatal de Arizona.

Murray aseguró cuando ganó el Sony Open en enero que había estado sobrio durante ocho meses, estaba comprometido para casarse y sentía que su mejor golf estaba por delante. Ese mismo mes fue nombrado miembro del Consejo Asesor de Jugadores de 16 miembros del PGA Tour.

Players are wearing red and black ribbons on Sunday at the @CSChallengeFW to honor Grayson Murray. Murray wore the colors of his hometown Carolina Hurricanes, when competing on Sundays. His family requested that ribbons with the same colors be worn Sunday. ❤️🖤 pic.twitter.com/zS3V0pwW0N — PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) May 26, 2024

El comisionado del PGA Tour, Jay Monahan, quien voló a Texas el sábado, dijo que había consejeros de duelo en el evento del PGA Tour y Korn Ferry Tour. “Estar en el vestuario, ver la devastación en los rostros de cada jugador que entra, es realmente difícil de ver. Y realmente profundo” , dijo Monahan durante la transmisión de CBS el sábado.

“Grayson fue un jugador notable en el PGA Tour, pero también era un hombre muy valiente. Y siempre me ha encantado eso de él, y sé que el vestuario está lleno de gente que realmente se lo quitará cuando lo haga”. Piensan en Grayson”.

Con información de ESPN y AP

Otras noticias de  PGA Tour

Tragedia en el golf. Murió un doble campeón del PGA Tour a los 30 años tras retirarse de un torneo

"Es un deporte difícil y muy solitario". Lo que Grillo no está dispuesto a hacer en busca de ser una estrella mundial del golf

Igualó un récord. El irlandés que venía mal, recibió un consejo "mágico" e hizo historia en el PGA Championship

Más leídas de deportes.

Primerizo. Así quedó la tabla de posiciones de la Fórmula 1, tras el triunfo de Leclerc en el GP de Mónaco

Su primer premio. Bota de Oro 2023/2024: así quedó la tabla de goleadores, con Kane en lo más alto

Sueño y frustración. El error que derrumbó la tarea de Agustín Canapino en las 500 Millas de Indianápolis

"Arquero, lo que sacaste". Alquiló una cancha de fútbol para el cumpleaños de su hijo y el “Gordo ventilador” se sumó al partido

Últimas noticias.

El mundo a sus pies. Es la supercampeona del golf, abruma a sus rivales y se lució en "la gran fiesta de la moda"