Drummer, percussionist, composer, radio host and Bronx Walk of Fame inductee Bobby Sanabria is one of the world’s foremost practitioners and scholars of Afro-Caribbean jazz, a nine-time GRAMMY nominee whose résumé runs through Mario Bauzá, Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie, and Mongo Santamaría. Ascensión is where it all started. Formed while Sanabria was still a South Bronx high schooler in the early 1970s, before Jerry González launched the Fort Apache Band, the group stands (by his account) as the longest continuously running Latin jazz small ensemble in New York. It received NEA support as far back as 1983.

Ascensión remains his laboratory: a hard-driving octet that moves across the full Latin jazz continuum, from clave-rooted dance rhythms to the harmonic sophistication of the current New York scene, delivered with the showmanship of a leader who learned bandstand craft from Puente himself. Sanabria’s recent work includes the Grammy-nominated Vox Humana and the new Arsenio Rodríguez tribute Arsenio and Beyond with his Multiverse Big Band; he is a professor at The New School, co-artistic director of the Bronx Music Hall, and host of WBGO’s Latin Jazz Cruise. Ascensión distills all of that history into small-group fire.