Name: Santos4tet Live!
Start: 2025-03-10T19:00:00-04:00
Location: The Roads Bistro

Santos4tet, aka Grupo Los Santos, makes its debut at The Roads Bistro on Monday March 10th, 2 sets starting at 7pm, free.
Santos4tet is a NYC-based quartet of guitar, bass, drums and tap dance/body percussion, often augmented with Afro-Cuban batá drums. They are a funky, rootsy, uniquely eclectic band which draws primarily from jazz and Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions, but also incorporates qualities of funk, Brazilian, and rock, among other influences. The sound is coherent, focused and intelligent, the music is simultaneously classic and forward-looking, and the expression is original, soulful, high-energy and transcendent of idiom.
Together for over 25 years, the band was first formed after drummer Bausch and tap dancer/body percussionist Pollak returned from their first trip to Cuba, as an outlet for the rhythmic concepts and adaptations they were learning and refining. Presented with a weekly gig at a local Hispanic cultural center (along with their name), Grupo Los Santos began developing an original approach to Afro-Cuban music with traditional jazz instrumentation and sensibility, along with the added visual flare of Pollak's dancing seamlessly woven into the music. They soon met and began performing regularly with Cuban trombone master Juan Pablo Torres, culminating in a concert of Cuban All-Stars at NYC’s Town Hall. A trip to Cuba soon followed, with the opportunity to tour with the famed rumba group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas (of which Pollak is still a member) and gigs at Havana's Cuba Tambor Festival and the jazz club La Zorra y el Cuervo.
Their albums have garnered some high praise, including top 5 Latin Jazz album of the year from All About Jazz (for "Lo Que Somos, Lo Que Sea"). Peter Watrous, longtime jazz critic for the NY Times wrote about "Clave Heart", Santos' 3rd release, "What a great, surprising recording...the music seems so right, so authentic in its intent, yet there's nothing traditional or academic about it at all...there's nothing like it that I've heard". Their latest album, "Santos 4" features compositions from all band members and a new collaborative compositional process on several tracks. Cyro Baptista wrote, "'Santos 4' has so much feeling and so much soul! It is a voyage, a transforming experience! A juice made with a lot of talent!".
This show is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.