Words by Anton Spice

Two films have changed Antonio Sánchez’s life. The second was Birdman.

Born in Mexico City in 1971, Sánchez was raised on his mother’s rock’n’roll records and his grandfather’s taste for classical music. Dismantling the kitchen for pots to play on, he was drawn to making noise and learned drums by accompanying his favourite Hendrix, Who, and Zeppelin records. You could say improvisation came naturally to him.

By the age of nine, Sánchez had his own drum kit and was beginning to hone the chops that would take him from rock and prog to the pinnacle of modern jazz, where he has lived for the last twenty years playing with the likes of Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, and Chick Corea. As with most narratives, however, Sánchez did not take the most direct route.

Back in 1984 - thirty years before Birdman - Sánchez had gone to the cinema to see Amadeus and become instantly obsessed, both with classical music and the prodigal nature of Mozart’s talent. Something clicked. If Mozart could do it, why couldn’t he? Although flush with the naivety of youth, that dedication, and restless drive has been an ever-present feature of Sánchez’s career.

As his musical education developed along both classical and jazz lines, first in Mexico and then the United States, Sánchez found himself learning tools that would compliment one another more than he could have anticipated. As in life, some things could be composed, planned, and worked towards, others were unexpected and required improvisation. When Mexican director Alejandro González Iñàrritu approached Sánchez to make the soundtrack for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), scoring a film couldn’t have been further from his mind.

The film was an Oscar-winning success. Jet-propelled by Sánchez’s skittish drum work, it shot him into uncharted territory, both in terms of audience and his own working process. Who knew solo drums could be so emotive?

In the seven years since Sánchez has found himself balancing the demands of a jazz drummer with a thirst for production and composition. In 2017, he released his first solo drum album, Bad Hombre, which picked up where Birdman left off. Reflecting the anxiety that gripped the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Bad Hombre allowed Sánchez to weave his own story into the electronic drones and caustic, percussive fabric of the album. A follow-up called Shifts: Bad Hombre 2, is due in March 2022 and will feature a set of Spanish and English-language vocal collaborators that include Trent Reznor, Meshell Ndegeocello, Chilean-French hip-hop artist Anna Tijoux and Sánchez’s wife, jazz vocalist Thana Alexa.

This desire to tell stories has also manifested in recent long-form albums with his band Migration, which Sánchez likens to working on films. He has learned from one of the best and says collaborating with Iñàrritu was like watching a jazz musician at work. Both he and the director understood implicitly that every story needs just enough structure to feel truly free.

Improvisation sometimes gets misused as a synonym for something which has no form. As a musician who has been trained in both jazz and classical traditions, the two must feel intimately connected for you?

Exactly, and even though you don't experience any kind of obvious or apparent improvisation in classical music, the way the compositions are structured really helped me to make storytelling my main mission every time I improvise. Taking cues from Mozart and Beethoven to see how they would write a symphony, and see how many times they could exploit the same motif, has been very inspiring.

Storytelling is a great word to use in the context of soundtracks. How present is the idea of narrative when you are composing?

Nowadays, it's all I think about. How to develop the story, how to introduce my characters, how to develop them, how to make them interesting, how to bring them back later in a completely different way. Every time you write you start by being home, and then you take all kinds of different trips and journeys, and the secret is how to get back home safely, after having learned a bunch of things during that journey.

Two of my latest records [with Migration] are called The Meridian Suite and Lines in the Sand. The Meridian Suite is one through-composed thing, from beginning to end. Of course, it has open sections for improvisation, but I wanted to experiment with what would happen if I started writing and just kept ongoing.

I really like long-form composition, because it's like a movie. It's like if you were doing shorts instead of full feature films. To tell an incredible story in five minutes is really hard, but I'm very interested in how much you can develop the story, and how much emotion you can inject into the whole thing, taking your time.

In that sense, was working on soundtracks something you had in mind earlier in your career?

To be honest, I was not thinking at all that I wanted to do music for film, but I was a big fan [of Iñàrritu]. When I met him, he had done his first two films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, so by the time he asked me to do this, he was already four films in. Obviously, to be offered Birdman was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, especially doing what I do, which is to play and improvise on the drums. That was the key.

It certainly makes the most of you as a drummer. What struck you initially about Iñàrritu’s approach?

I was just very impressed with his vision and artistry and uniqueness. When I started working with him, I realised he was very much like a jazz musician - a very interesting mix between a lot of planning and studying and then letting go completely, and trying to come up with something that will work in that moment with the circumstances that you're in. To me the coolest thing about the whole experience was working side-by-side with somebody who is so incredible at his craft, that is so completely different from my craft, but also intersects in many ways.

Was it difficult to flip your approach to a different medium? Having read the script, it can’t have been easy to imagine improvised drums in relation to a narrative that is already quite chaotic.

The thing is, initially I was trying to approach it as a film composer would, trying to write themes for the different actors and trying to figure out a more strategic and more scholastic way of doing things. But then I sent him the demos and he said, “they're great, but they're not at all what I'm looking for.” Instead, he said, “look, I just want you to improvise.” All I had to do was be myself and not worry too much about anything else, and that's exactly what happened.

Does it seem like there were many layers to the process? Your improvisations were also being orchestrated to a certain extent.

We got together in Avatar Studios in New York and did the whole movie just with the script. He would explain the scenes to me and have me improvise based on what we'd just talked about. It came to a point where every time he would see the next phase of the scene happening in his head, I would ask him to raise his hand to get the timing right. I realised that it was not that different from what I usually do, which is just react to what's in front of me.

Then they grabbed those demos and superimposed them on the rough cut. Obviously now having the film to play with meant we could get very specific about space, dialogue, and the physical activity of the actors and how to capture that.

One of the other things he wanted for the second session was to change the drum sound, because on the first session the drums sounded really pristine, and he kept saying, “this movie happens in the bowels of an old Broadway theatre, so can you make your drums sound like they've been in storage for a few years?”

Lots of film scores prompt emotional responses from the audience. Here, the drums are like another character in the film. Sometimes it feels like they're mapping Riggan’s blood pressure.

For sure, and his anger, his anxiety, his depression. One thing we all realised was how powerful the drums are without spelling it out all the time. Film scores can get so predictable and really force what you’re supposed to be feeling onto you, instead of leaving it open. The drums create an energy and a vibe without that spoon-feeding aspect of it. It created a language.

It also riffs on the idea of the punchline in a comedy. Sometimes the drums feel like they're responding to what's going on in the narrative and sometimes they're actually driving it.

I think it was one of those situations, with the acting and directing and the music, where everything seemed to help the other elements of the movie. Iñàrritu kept talking about the rhythm of comedy and how this, in essence, was a comedy, very dark of course.

I really like this idea of the drums creating a language for film scores. It not only takes the instrument beyond the role of time-keeper and but also accentuates its melodic potential.

Yeah, the melodic potential, but mostly I think the emotional aspect of it, which is completely overlooked. Nobody thinks of solo drums as being this emotional instrument, but you know it turns out they can be incredibly emotional and poignant.

Did this response also give you the confidence to put together a solo drum record in Bad Hombre?

Yes, that was the next step after this, now that we could all see how interesting the drums can be. But Birdman was under the direction of somebody else. What would I do now without having to please anybody but myself? And that was Bad Hombre.

I'm doing a different version of Bad Hombre now, with singers. Every track has a different singer, but it's all based on what the drums can do. So the vocals and the drums are the main instruments. I also wanted to use the drums as a production tool, like they use keyboards, guitars, or vocals, where they layer a multitude of sounds panned in different ways. Why not do that with the drums?

I suppose that spatial element also lends a certain cinematic feel to the whole listening experience.

Definitely. I feel like after Birdman and doing the live shows, I was way more aware of the cinematographic aspect of the music. I started for the first time really messing with electronics and sounds that were not made by humans but by machines and then combining them with a fully acoustic drum set. I was just very curious to see what would happen. It was just a big step for me as a composer, but mostly as a conceptualist and as a producer.

Stepping out of the shadow of Birdman, you have also worked on the documentary Politico, Get Shorty, TV commercials, and a film called Harami by Shyam Madiraju, which is still awaiting release. If there is such a thing as a comfort zone, it sounds like you’ve really pushed yourself out of it.

Yeah, that's why I wanted to do something that was completely out of character for me [on Shifts: Bad Hombre 2], which was to work singers and songs instead of instrumental music. I think the older I get, the more I feel the need to just keep reinventing myself. Birdman was a great way of discovering a different side of myself, and now I feel like if I don’t keep moving it forward and doing radically different things every couple of years, I start getting a little bored, which I think is a good thing.