From NPR Music, this is Alt Latino. I'm Felix Contreras.

In music, there are legends and there are icons.

And then there are musicians like Tino Contreras.

At 97 years old, he is an iconic living legend.

And describing him as just a jazz drummer from Mexico

City severely underplays his contribution to the presence of jazz in Mexico. The short version of

his biography is that he was born into a family of musicians in Chihuahua in northern Mexico in 1924. In his

20s, he moved to Wad on the border, where he sought out the

sounds of pre-war jazz and swing from musicians traveling from New York by passing over into El Paso.

In the 1950s, he moved to Mexico City and launched a career that made him a pioneer of Mexican jazzistas,

hardcore post-beboppers that mixed

in Mexican influences into their music.

He's released roughly an album a year since 1953, records with what we call straight-ahead

jazz, music that mixes in mariachi influences, and lots of records featuring Afro-Caribbean rhythms that are

popular in Mexico, and even a series of legendary and hard-to-find records that included pre-Columbian

musical forms and instruments. And now, just a week after his 97th birthday celebrated on April 3rd, he will show just how

ageless he is by doing two special online live performances from Frida Carlos

Casa Azul in Mexico City. So it is with particular pride and

orgouio that this week I present an interview with Tino Contreras recorded over Zoom from his home in Mexico City,

in which, while we are not related, he adopted me as his long-lost grandson.

This interview is completely in Spanish.

And for those that don't speak Spanish, please check our website.

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