For more than three decades as both a leader and a sideman, conguero Poncho Sanchez has stirred up a fiery stew of straight-ahead jazz, gritty soul music, and infectious melodies and rhythms from a variety of Latin American and South American sources. At any given show, on any given record, fragments of Latin jazz, swing, bebop, salsa and other infectious grooves collide, with results that are no less than dazzling. Sanchez grew up in a suburb of L.A., where he was raised on an unusual cross section of sounds that included straight-ahead jazz, Latin jazz and American soul. By his teen years, his musical consciousness had been solidified by the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Wilson Pickett and James Brown. Whatever the genre, the mesmerizing array of sounds and colors from Poncho Sanchez’s youth have telegraphed across the decades and continue to inform his creative sensibilities to this day.