Antonio Sánchez, Béla Fleck, and Edmar Castañeda Push Boundaries on BEATrio
Promo photo for Antonio Sánchez's 2022 album, SHIFT.
Image courtesy of the artist
Jazz drummer and composer Antonio Sánchez ’97 isn’t afraid to follow music into the unknown. On BEATrio(Opens in a new window), he joins banjoist Béla Fleck and harpist Edmar Castañeda for a genre-blurring collaboration, out May 16, 2025. The first single, “Archipelago,” is already turning heads—as Jambands.com(Opens in a new window) puts it, "Who knew banjo and harp could sound like this?"
"This project kind of reminds me of the early days of the Flecktones, when audiences would go, 'How the heck is this supposed to work?'” Fleck said in an Instagram caption, announcing the album. "I always love to know the unique people on different instruments, and I want to find folks to collaborate with who are the only ones who play that way. Castañeda and Sanchez are certainly all of that, and our new album, BEATrio, is just the beginning of that voyage."
Fleck, an 18-time Grammy Award winner, has been an advisor to Berklee's American Roots Music Program. Castañeda is a Grammy-nominated harpist and composer who consulted and played on Disney's Encanto soundtrack.
Sánchez, who studied performance at Berklee, composed the award-winning score for Birdman, the 2014 film that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Without any drum-centric scores at the time, "It was a very scary proposition because there was not point of reference. I really couldn’t turn to anything for guidance,” Sanchez told us in 2014. But the experience was powerful: “Just to hear myself in a movie theater really loud on top of those images was pretty special,” he said.
“When I came to Berklee in 1993, I had played jazz and listened to jazz but I was more into rock and fusion, so my instincts and sensibilities to improvise were not there. Berklee helped me so much,” Sánchez said. “I came in the door as a guy into impressing other musicians and other people and I left being a musician. One is miles away from the other.”
Listen to "Archipelago" now, and pre-order BEATrio(Opens in a new window):
