A moment of downtime gave Antonio Sánchez a full LP

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      Inspiration, accident, and accretion: all played a part in the creation of Antonio Sánchez’s impressively complex new album, The Meridian Suite. And, naturally, inspiration came first.

      Although the Mexico City–born Sánchez studied composition and classical piano before moving to the United States, he’s probably best known as a drummer. He’s been Pat Metheny’s percussionist of choice since 2002, and also created the score for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Academy Award–winning Birdman—in a single uninterrupted take, no less. But when he’s on the road he always packs a small keyboard, just in case he feels like writing music. That’s what happened one day in 2012, when he had some downtime in Meridian, Mississippi, and used it to create the brief, syncopated theme that opens his new record.

      “I liked it, so I saved it in my computer,” he explains, reached at home in New York City. “And I saved it as ‘Meridian’, so I could remember where I wrote it.”

      Two years later, he was getting ready to record with his band, Migration, but things weren’t going well. To put it bluntly, Sánchez was having a hard time coming up with an album’s worth of material—until he remembered his moment of Mississippi inspiration.

      “I listened to it and I still liked it, which was a good sign, and I started working from there,” he recalls. “All of a sudden I had, like, 15 minutes of music, and I realized I was kind of writing a novel instead of short stories.”

      Sánchez also realized that his placeholder title, “Meridian”, could be mined for further thematic material. A meridian, the 43-year-old musician explains, is an imaginary line that circles the earth—or, in Chinese medicine, a conduit for energy within the human body. “There’s many ways to look at them, but basically they interact, they intertwine, and in this long piece that I was writing I realized I was creating a lot of motifs and rhythms and grooves and melodies that were doing the same thing,” he says. “I would write something, and then I’d bring it back with a different treatment, maybe in another section of the tune. So it just started making sense, the analogy between the meridians and what I was writing.”

      The album, as a whole, lives up to both meanings of the term meridian. Over the course of its 55 minutes, The Meridian Suite ebbs and flows in a decidedly filmic way: “Magnetic Currents”, for instance, features a wildly extroverted sax solo from Migration’s Seamus Blake, a former Vancouver resident, while guest singer Thana Alexa adds wordless vocals to the contemplative finale of “Pathways of the Mind”. Sánchez also seems to have learned a few things from his friend and employer Metheny, at least when it comes to writing music that invokes a journey.

      “It’s like when you take a really long trip,” he says. “You come back home having had all these different experiences. And it also interconnects with the Birdman score because of the long-take concept. I wanted to make something that was one long take, basically—almost where you’re not allowed to blink. If you tell the story right, it should be like reading a good book, or watching a great movie.”

      Antonio Sánchez & Migration play Performance Works next Saturday (June 27) as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

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