Sanchez grew up in Mexico City in a household that took music seriously. He moved to Boston to study at Berklee and then migrated to New York, which is where the real education happened. He landed in Pat Metheny's group in the late 1990s and stayed for years — and that relationship did a lot to define how people outside the jazz world first heard him. Metheny's music demands a drummer who can hold a groove with zero ego while still making the whole thing breathe, and Sanchez was exactly that guy.

What makes him interesting as a drummer is the combination of technical command and actual taste. He can play incredibly complex things without ever making it feel like an obstacle course. His time feel is elastic in the best way — he pushes and pulls without losing the center, and he has this ability to build intensity gradually that makes a lot of other drummers seem impatient by comparison. He studied the lineage carefully: you can hear Tony Williams, you can hear Jack DeJohnette, but he doesn't sound like either of them. He sounds like himself.

The Birdman (Original Soundtrack) (2014) project was genuinely unusual. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu wanted a live drumming score — no orchestra, no temp tracks, just Sanchez improvising to rough cuts of the film. The result is relentless in the best way: it mirrors the anxiety and momentum of the movie without being illustrative or cute about it. The album stands on its own as a solo percussion statement, which is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds. It got him a lot of new listeners who had no idea he'd been one of the most in-demand drummers in jazz for over a decade.

He's led his own groups throughout his career and has made records under his own name that are worth spending time with. Bad Hombre (2017) is a good entry point — it's politically charged, made during a specific and ugly moment in American immigration politics, and it channels that anger into music that actually sounds angry rather than just gesturing at it. He plays with fire there in a way that his sideman work, by necessity, doesn't always allow.

If you're coming to Sanchez fresh, start with something where the spotlight is directly on him — either Birdman or Bad Hombre — and then go back and listen to him inside a band context, maybe a live Metheny recording. That contrast tells you a lot about his range. He's a drummer who adapts completely to whoever he's serving, and that's a skill that gets underrated because it looks effortless when it's working.