Latin Jazz Meets Opera is a deeply personal album. It tells the story of Christopher Sánchez’s life through music, tracing how Latin rhythm, opera, and jazz shaped his identity across family, migration, and place. What begins in the Dominican Republic through inherited sound and memory unfolds in New York City, where those traditions converge and mature. This album is not a stylistic experiment. It is the sound of a life lived between cultures, brought into focus through voice.
Caribbean music has always evolved through migration. In the twentieth century, Latin rhythms and American jazz collided in New York and gave rise to Latin Jazz, a genre born from diaspora and shaped by memory, reinvention, and ambition. With this album, Sánchez takes the next step in that evolution. He brings Latin Jazz into opera not as a novelty, but as a continuation of Caribbean artistry, becoming more expansive and more fully at home in its adopted capital.
Christopher's story begins with his mother being from Santiago, Dominican Republic, within a musical inheritance shaped by the mid-twentieth century. Bolero, cha-cha-chá, crooner elegance, and salon orchestras formed the sound world of his parents’ generation, carried forward through radio broadcasts, late-night gatherings, and family ritual. His family absorbed this music long before he was born, and he inherited it before he could name it. Music moved through living rooms and conversations, through shared stories and collective memories.
Growing up in the United States, Christopher learned Spanish at home, where Latin music was played freely. Outside, English dominated and other customs prevailed. Music became a way of navigating those parallel worlds. It raised questions that followed him everywhere. While Caribbean rhythm felt instinctive in his body, opera spoke strongly to his imagination.
Rather than preserving heritage as nostalgia, Latin Jazz Meets Opera reanimates memory through contemporary production, Afro-Caribbean rhythm, cinematic jazz harmony, and operatic storytelling. Told through beloved works from the American, Latin American and European opera songbooks and shaped by outstanding collaborators. The story begins with the radio.
Quien Será evokes broadcasts traveling across islands and borders in the middle of the twentieth century. Cuban salons, Dominican dance halls, and the distant glow of New York jazz coexisted in the same sonic space, forming the musical backdrop passed down to him through family memory. Caribbean music entered the American imagination during that period, eventually becoming “Sway” with English lyrics. This was long before Christopher would later reinterpret it through his own voice. By combining these sounds, he shows how migration moves music as surely as it moves people.
Carmen’s Habanera marks his arrival in New York City, where Caribbean rhythm and jazz had already blended into Latin Jazz. By then, Sánchez was immersed in opera, absorbing the classical repertoire with the same intensity his family once absorbed bolero. Watching Carmen repeatedly and then sitting late at night in New York jazz clubs, he began to hear Bizet’s glorious music differently. Opera seduction revealed itself through Caribbean pulse.
Carmen’s Habanera is the first of three vocal duets on this album with the soprano Jazmine Saunders. With roots in Panama, she now resides in New York. She is a graduate of Eastman, Juilliard and of the Metropolitan Opera's Lindeman program. Saunders and Sánchez have developed an endearing friendship since growing up together musically, a bond that shines through this collaboration.
Là ci darem la mano grows from that realization. Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the first opera Sánchez attended in New York. Watching the famous seduction scene of Zerlina, he recognized a kind of flirtation familiar from Caribbean music. Setting the duet as a danzón allowed elegance and restraint to shape the moment when theatrical romance begins to slip into something real.
In Damisela Encantadora, romance steps off the stage. In Dominican culture, love is not hinted at. It is sung. Sánchez stages a serenade inside a jazz club, surrounded by friends, humor, and desire. He sings a nostalgic song from her childhood, not simply to impress her, but to remind her where she comes from.
Unforgettable becomes a first date. Though it is a classic American standard, Sánchez experiences it as a bolero, the Latin genre of love. Where American romance often feels polished and distant, bolero is slow, tender, and unafraid of emotional exposure. This track translates an American love song into Caribbean emotional language. That love, however, is fragile.
The Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera Lakmé captures innocence at its peak. Singing together becomes a moment of imagined harmony already destined to fracture. She longs to return to another country. Sánchez’s loyalty is anchored in New York and the opera house. The arrangement omits the final word, “bleu,” subtly breaking the symmetry and foreshadowing separation. After she leaves, the album turns inward.
Bachata Rosa becomes a love song not to a person, but to the Dominican Republic itself. Bachata does not represent where Sánchez lives, but where his people are. Family, memory, and the version of himself that exists in Spanish surface immediately. Quizás, Quizás inhabits emotional suspension. It is longing held inside dignity. There is no protest, only
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 unanswered questions and deferred choices. The Shadow of Your Smile follows him into a jazz club, where absence becomes palpable. The bolero language of love collides with lyrics already spoken from loss.
Christopher’s composition Un Retoño de Santiago is the moment of naming. Sánchez no longer defines himself by exile or romance. He identifies himself as a descendant of a place, a culture, and a sound world. He understands that home is not only geography. It is lineage carried in the voice. Salsa, born from the Caribbean diaspora in New York, affirms his belonging and his role in advancing that lineage.
The bonus track, The Christmas Song, functions as an epilogue. Set in New York during the holidays, it reconnects Sánchez with a childhood wish to become a singer. The album closes quietly, not with return or romance, but with recognition.
Christopher Sánchez’s path hasn’t been linear. Trained at the Eastman School of Music under tenor Robert Swensen, he was rejected at his first audition. Instead of retreating, he listened. The sound of practice rooms confirmed his calling. He returned, was admitted, and immersed himself fully in voice, diction, theory, history, and language. He lived the school’s motto: “Eat Sleep Music”. Major operatic roles followed, always accompanied by the Caribbean music that shaped him first.
I connect to this journey deeply. Like Christopher, I once worked on Wall Street. And like him, I have created operas. I understand the pull of multiple identities and the challenge of bringing them into harmony. Listening to Latin Jazz Meets Opera, I hear a kindred spirit. Someone who knows that music is not simply craft or career. It is inheritance. It is expression. It is home.
Kabir Sehgal
Multiple Grammy winning producer
Recorded by: Gregory "Phace" Fils-Aimé
at Engine Room Audio Studios, New York, N.Y. on January, 9th-15th 2025.
Mixed by: Danilo Pichardo at Addictive Audio Studios, New York, ,N.Y.
Mastered by: Jett Galindo at Muni Sound LLC, Los Angeles, CA.
Additional remixes: Luis Salazar, Miami, FL (tracks 5, 10).
Arrangements: Christopher Sánchez, Dayramir Gonzalez.
Orchestration: Dayramir Gonzalez.
Liner Notes: Kabir Sehgal.
Photography: Luis Guillen, Kiana Lilly.
Art Direction and Package Design: Jack Frisch.
Producers: Joachim “Jochen” Becker, Christopher Sánchez, Dayramir Gonzalez.
Executive Producers: Christopher Sánchez, Gwen Greene, Alvin Mojica.
Publishing: SONY/ATV Publishing (1,10); Public Domain (2, 3, 6); Edward B Marks Company (4); The Songwriters Guild of America o/b/o Unforgettable Standards (5); Universal Musica Unica Publishing (7); Caribbean Music Co, Sony/ATV Discos Music Publishing (8); EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and EMI Miller Catalog (9); Wall Street Opera (10); SONY ATV Tunes and MPL Publishing o/b/o Edwin H Morris Co. (11).
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