Roland Vazquez

Roland Vazquez is a Chicano/Native American composer, drummer, bandleader, producer, and educator whose work integrates Afro and Indigenous rhythms with American jazz and Western classical music. Born on July 4, 1951, in Pasadena, California, he is the nephew of Richard Vasquez, the activist and author of the bestselling novel Chicano. Vazquez began playing drums in the 1960s, performing with R&B and rock groups in the Los Angeles area. He subsequently studied at Westminster College and earned a Master of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music.

His Broadway appearance came in 1952 with the Slavenska-Franklin Co. His jazz career gained significant institutional support in 1977, when the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Jazz Performance Grant, which helped fund the recording Urban Ensemble – The Music of Roland Vazquez, released in 1979 on Arista/GRP. Billboard Magazine described the album as "funky-salsa-bebop ... a decade ahead of its time." Between 1978 and 1981, Vazquez was a core member of Clare Fischer's group Salsa Picante, contributing drums to the Grammy-winning album Salsa Picante 2+2. During the same period, he arranged the horn parts on Peter Cetera's self-titled 1981 debut album and arranged horns on Whitren and Cartwright's Rhythm Hymn for producer Phil Ramone.

As a recording artist, Vazquez has released albums including Feel Your Dream (1982), The Tides of Time (1988), No Separate Love (1991), Further Dance (1997), Quintet Live (2007), and The Visitor (2010). The Aaron Copland Fund for Music awarded him a grant in 2009 to support the recording of The Visitor as part of its New American Recording Projects initiative. Both Further Dance and The Visitor received coverage in publications including DownBeat and JazzTimes, with Further Dance noted for its original compositions and multi-genre hybridization, and The Visitor recognized for its musicianship. His compositions have been performed and recorded by ensembles and jazz orchestras internationally, and he has been commissioned to write for chamber and orchestral settings, including Ghost in the Mountain (2000) and chamber percussion pieces for Christopher Lamb. Among the musicians who have recorded with him are Anthony Jackson, Patrice Rushen, Bennie Maupin, Clare Fischer, Alex Acuña, Nathan East, Brian Lynch, Dick Oatts, Walt Weiskopf, Mark Soskin, Shirley Walker, Luis Conte, Abe Laboriel, Samuel Torres, Mike Stern, and Steve Tavaglione.

Vazquez has performed at venues across Los Angeles and New York, including the Baked Potato, the Lighthouse Café, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Birdland, the Village Gate, and Seventh Avenue South, as well as at festivals including the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the Edmonton International Jazz Festival, and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. He has led his octet and quintet in performance and on tour from 1975 to 2015 and has periodically fronted his own big band.

His teaching career began at the Manhattan School of Music in 1988, where he directed jazz combos and founded the Latin Jazz Big Band, remaining on faculty until 1999. From 2000 to 2005, he taught at the University of Michigan, where his responsibilities included the Jazz Composition sequence, a course on Music of the Afro Latin Diaspora, and direction of jazz combos, a forty-piece avant-garde improviser's ensemble, and an Afro-Latin Jazz ensemble. He served as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome from 2005 to 2006, composing new works and performing with Italian and touring American jazz artists. Since 2019, he has been a Visiting Artist at Bard College, where he developed the two-semester lecture course Music of the Black Atlantic, the Afro Caribbean Percussion Ensemble, and the Afro Caribbean Jazz Ensemble. In 2024, he delivered a guest lecture titled "The Drum: Universal Mirror, Universal Body-clock" at the Bard Prison Initiative at Fishkill Facility. Vazquez has also conducted performance and lecture clinics at institutions including the Eastman School of Music, Berklee School of Music, Georgetown University, and Queens College, among others.