Poncho Sanchez adds spice to the salsa at Jazz Alley

If you tell Poncho Sanchez he plays "West Coast Salsa," he doesn't mind, but, as with everything else about this mellow, soft-spoken conga player with the bushy beard and beret, he'll give you a mild-mannered, but firm, response.

"What you're talking about was more visible in the '50s, '60s and '70s, when the bands from New York were stronger, more advanced, and more aggressive," says the 48-year-old band leader, who appears at Jazz Alley today through Sunday. "All we had out here was Cal Tjader, Willie Bobo and Eddie Cano. But it's not like that no more. The bands here in L.A. and San Francisco, even some of the bands up in Seattle, are more aggressive. We've caught up."

It's hard to argue, particularly after listening to Sanchez's 19th album for Concord Picante, "Latin Soul," a live date that includes a sexy rendering of Mongo Santamaria's mambo, "Besame Mama," and a clever reworking of the traditional "Guaripumpe."

"I got that from an old charanga album by La Charanga Orquesta Broadway," confesses Sanchez. "The title doesn't really mean anything. It's like be-bop language. I added back-up singing from another old charanga record called `La Cartera' - `The Wallet.' "

Sanchez's syncretic method no doubt stems from his youth in the barrio of Norwalk, Calif. - his background is Chicano, not Cuban - where he grew up hearing cha-chas, mambos, and pachangas along with ranchero music, cumbias, soul music and jazz.

"When I was a young kid," he says, "I thought (Cuban) music was from Texas!"

Starting on guitar, he got hooked on playing conga drums when he was 18, while playing cumbias in a group called Lil' Jimmy y sus Vagabundos. The rest of his career reads like a storybook. At a 1975 show by Tjader, after being introduced by a fan to the seminal West Coast Latin band leader, Sanchez sat in. Two weeks later, he was hired.

Sanchez played with Tjader until 1982, netting a Grammy for the 1980 album, "La Ondo Va Bien." Concord then started its Picante line to feature Sanchez with his own band. In spite of what he says about the relaxation of differences between coasts, Sanchez had to earn the respect he now enjoys.

"The first time we went to New York City," he recalls, "we played at the Village Gate. In the front row, there was Manny Oquendo, Tito Puente - all my heroes - and they weren't sitting there with a smile, man. They had their arms folded and were looking real serious, like `Let's see what this Mexican kid from L.A. has got.' After the first set, they were all back in the dressing room like we had been friends all our lives."

Hasidic New Wave

The American ethnic stew continues to yield surprising and tasty morsels. While Chicanos play Afro-Cuban in California, young jazz musicians in New York have begun to explore their Jewish roots.

Radical Jewish Music, a movement instigated by John Zorn, began with a series of concerts in Munich in 1992. It has spawned a plethora of groups, including the gut-cranking quintet, Hasidic New Wave, which plays Tuesday at Jazz Alley and includes former Seattle drummer Aaron Alexander. When he lived here, Alexander played with the klezmer band, the Mazeltones, but he stresses that Hasidic New Wave comes from a different tradition.

"It grew out of guys playing Jewish weddings," he explains. "It's not really klezmer, it's more hasidic songs, with some modern Israeli songs. A lot of the material is taken from wordless vocals, called nigunim."

He also points out that the band plays a lot of Arabic scales, a deliberately political statement. An aggressive, punk-jazz group with a trumpet/saxophone front line, Hasidic New Wave is a great showcase for Alexander's energetic, multi-directional drumming, as well as David Fiucynski's distinctive, warbling guitar, which sometimes mimics a theremin.

After a couple of its members were arrested in New York City for smoking a joint, the band wrote "Giuliani Uber Alles," a hilarious, speed-metal send-up of a Dead Kennedys tune, as a rebuke to New York's reactionary mayor. The song appears on the band's third album, "Kabalogy" (Knitting Factory), highly recommended, as is their show.

Paul de Barros is a free-lance writer. His Jazz Etc. column appears weekly in Ticket.