Felix B. Sainz, Jr. - a musician’s story
Every musician has a story, as we all do. It’s interesting to learn where they came from, about their childhood, and what led them to become a musician.
According to his website felixsainz.com, Sainz, an electric and upright bassist, classic guitarist, and vocalist, has over 35 years of professional experience in the performing arts. He has performed with a multitude of artists in local, regional, national, and international venues and recorded with many artists. Proficient in many styles and techniques, over the decades he has been on the roster of studio musicians at Chaton, Tempest, Clamsville, Choice Productions, Brick Road and many other recording studios. In addition, Sainz has performed in live and studio settings for the campuses of the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences.
“I am the oldest of three siblings. My parents are originally from the state of New Mexico and all my ancestors lived in that region since the 1500s, before there was the United States or borders.”
Both of Sainz’s grandfathers had some land in a little town called San Miguel, which is just North of El Paso. One of his grandfathers had the last milpa (a land track used for agriculture) on which he raised chickens and hogs, and grew cotton, organic melons, beans, chile, tomatoes, squash, and corn. But it was only two or three acres by the time Sainz was there as a boy. Sainz remembers having to pump water by hand, and his grandfather lived in a small adobe home heated with a wood stove. “That's where my mother was born,” Sainz recalled. “Both my parents come from large families. They worked in the fields, picking cotton and fruit, sometimes having to migrate to follow the work. After so many generations, the pieces of land got smaller and smaller. There was nothing really left for them to stay there for, so they moved to Phoenix, Arizona after they were married in 1953. That’s where I was born, in 1956.”
Today, Sainz recognizes that growing up, there were many that had it much worse than his family and is grateful for everything that they did have. “We were growing up in trailer houses up until I was in first grade. We lived way on the edge of Phoenix. My dad was working for different developers, working in 120 degree heat all day. He would come home just wiped out. While he worked, my mom took care of us, and she made ends meet. She'd go out in the back, pick up some weeds and throw a half pound of meat in there, or cheese, or whatever and made some tortillas, and that's what we ate. I never knew a steak until I was in high school. I didn’t know what it was like to have a whole piece of meat to myself.”
Sainz grew up in the barrio, but the stigma of being poor if you lived there was not one that Sainz was privy to either, nor really cared. “I didn't know we were poor. We were happy, we were healthy and we didn't know nothing, but, you know, I did understand.” Sainz said that their parents didn't want him and his siblings to speak Spanish because of the negative treatment they could receive, and the discrimination that at that time, was common.
In the midst of his childhood, Sainz was exposed to music, an exposure that would shape the rest of his life. “I was eight years old. I think it was right after third grade, and they had not a summer school, but kind of a summer recreation program at the school. You could go and hang out and play checkers. I think they had a foosball table, a couple of tether balls and whatever, it was meager. We had an asphalt basketball court. I don't even think we had a net. A lot of times we would be playing with a coffee can or something. One day, these two gentlemen Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Bothwell showed up. They had three cornets and three clarinets. They said they we're going to ‘make a band and teach you how to read music. Who wants to join?’ So, there's six instruments and there were maybe 20 or 30 kids. The gentlemen would look at our mouth and our teeth and say, ‘okay, well you could play cornet, or you might be able to play clarinet’ or whatever, and we would take turns blowing into the instruments.”
Sainz said they narrowed down the field, and those chosen were taught how to read music. Sainz was playing the cornet and trumpet. “We were playing songs like Hawaii Five-O, Batman, and Tijuana Brass.”
Sainz progressed in his music playing during that summer, which led to him joining a band during the school year. “As I got older, I got into band, and we would compete at state competitions. We had to wear the sash dress white shirt and black pants, that was the concert attire.”
One Christmas, when he was 13 or 14, he remembered receiving a cassette tape recorder. His family already had a little record player. “I would do my chores, and my parents, they’d give me a little allowance, and I would go off to the record store and buy a 45 for a buck.”
Although Sainz’s father played guitar, his parents didn’t encourage music, especially as he got older. They thought he would become alcoholic and sleep late. “But, you know, I always had a job of some sort. I was washing dishes at the cafeteria at school so I could have lunch. So, I was always working, doing things around the house, and they (his parents) would give me some money.”
Eventually, Sainz started playing the guitar and had joined a garage band as many young musicians do. In a way it was maybe by circumstance that he came into playing the bass. “In the band there was a bass player that would never practice, and one day he just didn't show up to rehearsal. So, there was this bass. With me figuring out songs on the guitar, I also figured out the bass parts for the songs I had heard on the radio. That is what enabled me by ear to learn these songs. So, I was early for rehearsal, nobody was there yet. I grabbed the bass, and was picking away on it, and the rest of the band walked in. They asked where Archie (the bass player) was, and I told them he didn’t show up. They saw me playing the bass and they said, ‘we didn’t know you could play the bass.” Now, Sainz said, he had to figure out how to get his own bass.
For a while he was playing the trumpet and bass at the same time, literally. But he finally just gravitated more towards playing the bass. Humbly, Sainz admitted, was not a very good trumpet player. He was playing the third parts and couldn’t reach the high notes.
As Sainz got older, he had more opportunities to learn songs. “I had a friend of mine, a guitar player, his brother had a band and they played weddings and Mexican music. He invited me over to his grandmother's house. He had an amp and a couple of guitars. I would play one of them, and just play the bass parts. Finally, he said, ‘You gotta get yourself a bass’. So, my dad being in construction and having tools, was always like an inventor. He would take things and fix them and stuff like that. I kind of picked up on that.” Sainz’s father went to Western Auto, a type of hardware and sell all store. Kind of like a True Value hardware store that also sold bicycles and instruments etcetera. He had bought a used Western Auto guitar and a little amp. Sainz had his eye on the guitar his father had bought one day, and said something just possessed him to take that guitar and drill out the holes to make bigger holes for bass strings. “Well, I didn't have money to buy bass strings, so I went and found different wires and stuff my father had. I found a wire on old rotary phone, the black wire that went from the phone into the wall. That was my E string. Then other wires that I found that were kind of smaller were the other strings as they go down. So, I worked that out, and that's the bass that I played for a while,” Sainz said chuckling.
In high school, Sainz played a short stint in the orchestra albeit the French horn, because the school didn’t have a stand-up bass and all the trumpets were spoken for. Needless to say, the French horn was not for him. He ended up playing football, but continued playing music outside of school. He noted during his high school years is when he really came into his own as a musician.
Hardship for Sainz’s family struck during his junior year. His mother took sick and his father was laid off from his job. With the family struggling, Sainz went to work to help out. He would go to school half a day and work the other half. In addition to earning money to help his family, there was a plus, he was able to save up some money and put a record player on lay away. “From there, I could buy album music, all kinds of music. I think that’s when I started getting interested in jazz. I couldn't understand it, but I liked it, it was just the complexity of it all. Even though I played in big concert bands, I knew the parts. I could listen to different parts, harmonies, but I didn't understand it all yet. I could read music, but I didn't know the theory and arrangements and all that come through them, but I could appreciate,” he said.
By the time he graduated high school, he managed to save enough money to buy himself a real bass and a used amplifier, and was playing in a band. They played a school dance, playing Motown, Credence Clearwater Revival, Buddy Miles, even some country. The band also played weddings performing Cumbia (a type of Latin American dance music of Colombian origin, similar to salsa and using guitars, accordions, bass guitar, and percussion).
Eighteen at the time, the band Sainz played in got a gig at a popular music venue called the Satin Doll. “Certain nights it was Hispanic night, and others were Black night. Very rarely did they have people from both playing, but it started getting mixed. We were playing music and we were just partying. It was a good band for, I mean, for a young bunch of young kids. The guitar player was really helpful to me. He had a good job with Reynolds aluminum. I don't know what he did, but he always had a nice car, always had pocket money. He’d pick me up and say, ‘Let's go buy some records’, and we’d buy albums like Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire, Steely Dan, and occasionally Joe Pass or Chick Corea. We would go to back to his house to his room, where he had a nice JBL system that played records. We would sit there and learn every song off an album, by ear, by memory. I got really good at that.”
While playing in bands, Sainz always kept himself busy working in the construction business, from building houses to pouring and forming concrete. But he hungered to attending college. "I got a job at this department store as a shipping clerk. I would get a whole hour for my lunch break. Well, Glendale Community College was another mile down the road. So, on my lunch hour, I'd go to the college. Everybody would be at lunch, so there was nobody in the music room. I would sneak in casually, and there was an upright bass in one of the rehearsal rooms. I would go in there and play the bass for a half hour to 45 minutes. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was groovin’. After about a month of doing that every day, a professor came in and said, ‘I don't recognize you and you're not enrolled here are you?’, and I said, ‘no I'm not’. He says, ‘well, I've been listening to you for about a month now’. His office was around the other side. He said, ‘I've got a proposition for you. If you come and play bass for the jazz combo on Thursday nights here at the school, I'll pay for your tuition and your books, and give you a stipend’. I'd never been to college at that point. So, I said, ‘Okay, you're on’. I took two courses at night school, and learned basic theory and jazz improvisation. I had learned how to read treble clef before, but I didn't know bass clef. So that forced me to learn bass clef. Then, I understood what I’d been doing this whole time. Because, everything up until that point was all by ear, by memory. School really propelled me to another level, and that's when I started playing fusion and jazz, and what got me into a band named Panacea, leading to some notoriety and a TV special.”
While listening to Sainz story, I wondered if his parents would ever accept his being a musician. Well, they did when they saw their son on tv in an 80’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) special on the band titled, “A very Natural Panacea”. It featured the local Phoenix band performing at the Celebrity Theater. “We were doing all the warm up for the concerts that came through the theater, like BB King, Herbie Mann, Sergio Mendes, the Average White Band, people like that. It was a good band, really excellent musicians.” Panacea’s saxophone player’s wife happened to own a popular local jazz club called the Century Skyroom where the band played regularly. Sainz acknowledged he got to this point in his career after working his way up the ranks and playing on the road with a band for eight years prior. Attending college certainly didn’t hurt either. Sainz pointed out that learning jazz theory had really opened up doors for him.
After being featured on the PBS tv special, Sainz said he had to join a union. That opened the doors for more gigs and notoriety, and Sainz said he started getting other calls for casuals, where you show up, put on a tuxedo and play at a restaurants, weddings, other venues and events. “So, that ended up with me playing with some big bands. I played high society weddings, fundraisers, I even played for some royalty.” Sainz also began playing with trios, and backing up singers.
Sainz recalls playing a concert at the Celebrity Theater, warming up for jazz flutist Herbie Mann that was into a Brazilian type of sound. “The next day, I went to this festival and there's this lady Carmen Guerrero who had an all-girl band called Xicanindio. They were dressed in their traditional clothing, playing this Bolivian style music with these weird instruments. It was beautiful. I went up to them and I said, ‘how come you don't have a bass player?’. Carmen had recognized me from the previous night’s Herbie Mann concert and said she wanted to get together and have me play with her group. So, I did.”
Sainz was now being exposed to music from Brazil, music that normally he wouldn’t have access to. “They're given it to me on a cassette. So, I listen to them, and then they teach me all the rhythms. I learned all the percussion rhythms, all the different instruments, and became pretty good at a few of them.” Sainz went on the road with Xicanindio which led to yet another appearance on TV.
Eventually, the band formulated a music program for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a program that would find them traveling to schools and venues throughout the Southwest. “They would pay you to come up to their school and do a clinic, concert or workshop,” said Sainz. The band played different instruments from all over and incorporated a slide presentation with geographical information and pictures of the people, their traditions, and the natural resources of South America. “It was very educational. The presentations were called informances, because it was a performance and information that we would share. We were doing everything from preschool to college level, public performances and performances at museums all over Colorado, New Mexico, and even into Mexico. I was on the roster with several different artists for many years doing that.”
One of the most memorable schools that Sainz recalled, was the Santa Fe School for the Deaf. The performance would show Sainz that music is not just experienced through hearing sound. “When I got to the address on the itinerary, I was wondering what we were doing there, and what were we going to do, they can't hear anything.” He walked into the auditorium that had wood floors like a basketball court would have, and was built in a Spanish style architecture. “So, I started setting up the PA and all the equipment. People were starting to come in and sit down.” Sainz said they were not all kids either, but all ages. He started to tune up his upright bass. “I hit that E string, and what happened was, it vibrated through the stage and into the floor of the auditorium. It's just a big cavern, so it just kind of blossomed. The reaction of the people that were sitting there was like, some of them stand up and they were started tapping on their chests, like they could feel it. That's the thing about the bass, people can feel it.” Sainz said it was a “big aha” moment, he had affected the whole audience with just one note.
Over the years Sainz became an educator and clinician. He has performed with various artists in workshops, music clinics and seminars. In addition to his work with programs offered on the music roster for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he has worked in the Wolf Trap Arts Education & Outreach music programs for children at the Herberger Theatre in Phoenix and Scottsdale Center for the Arts.
With his experience playing with many different musicians, I asked Sainz if there was any one musician that stood out in his mind that he considered a mentor. He replied, “I mean, over the years, people that kind of just accepted me and challenged me. Like the guitar player that took me aside and said, ‘Hey, try this, play this”, and the people that took me under their wing and showed me how to play bebop. There are people like C.C. Jones who had an orchestra I played in. He treated us well. We played all of these high society weddings. We weren't treated like just whatever, because a lot of times musicians get treated poorly. We were paid as well; we got some dignity and respect out of that. It helped to build my character.” There was one person though, Sainz said helped him realize his dream of playing bass. A man from Chicago named, Tom Golden. Sainz said there was a jazz club called Boojum Tree where he would go to listen to Golden perform. “His band was playing Brazilian music, and they're playing this tune, I knew the song. Golden took a solo on the upright bass. I wanted to learn how to do that. I went up to him on the break. I asked him if he gave lessons and he said, ‘yeah, do you have a bass?’. I said, ‘No, I play electric’.”
Eventually, Sainz went over to Golden’s place. Golden asked him to just play and he would listen. “So, I played for about 15 minutes just noodling around and asked him, ‘Well, what do you think?’, and he says, ‘You don't need lessons, just do that on an upright bass. Okay, you're done’. He pretty much dismissed me at that point. So, as I'm packing up, I say, ‘You know, anybody that has a bass? I don't care what it looks like, I just need to be able to play it right now’. All of a sudden, his demeanor changed and he says, ‘You want a bass and you don't care what it looks like, right?’”. Golden took Sainz into his back yard, and there in the middle of the yard stuck in the dirt, was an old bass. Golden said, “If you want a bass, there’s a bass”. Sainz said, “It was a bass, just standing there falling apart, delaminated, with the neck leaning forward. But everything was there,” Sainz exclaimed. Golden told him if he could yank it out of the dirt, it was his. “So, I bent down, and tried not to crush it and yanked it out, dirt clumps and all. I put it in my van and that was the beginning of the bass restoration project. It is my favorite bass that I play now,” he said smiling.
Paying his dues, playing with many bands and musicians at countless venues, Sainz finally got a taste of the big time. Sainz said at that time, he was really into playing funk. “In the 90’s, I did a few tours with the band Sister Sledge. Typically, it would be a weekend, we would travel one day, do a show and travel the next day. We went all over the place, San Francisco, Baltimore, Birmingham, St. Kitts and the Bahamas, and played different festivals.” The first show Sainz played with Sister Sledge was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was a city music festival with multiple stages set up. “We were playing on the Coca Cola stage, which is huge. We went on after Donna Summer. I remember walking up the ramp to that stage and seeing the ocean of people. There were maybe 80,000 people. We're doing a soundcheck and I hit the bass, the sound from those big speakers echoed. It was another aha moment, this was a taste of the big time.”
Sainz has been married for 38 years to the love his life, Melanie Tallmadge, whom he met in Arizona while she was a student at Arizona State University. An enrolled member of the Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk) Nation from Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, Melanie is an artist. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Little Eagle Arts Foundation (L.E.A.F), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting American Indian art.
When their children were born, Sainz said he had to back away a bit from playing music, so he and his wife could focus on raising their children Amado and Felisia. When his children were older, he was able to put more of his focus on playing music.
“I went back to playing music again and working with all the top musicians in Phoenix, like Dennis Rowland, who toured with Count Basie. All the singers that I worked with, had all these wonderful repertoires of music, I got to learn all of it, and play with the best musicians there.” Sainz said he adapted and formulated his own repertoire from those relationships. “Working with all these different singers, a lot of them play the same songs, but they're in different keys. You have to be very adept at transposing on the spot. They'll call a tune, the key, the tempo, and boom, you're going.”
Today, Sainz spends his Fall, Winter, and Spring with his wife at their home in Phoenix. His Summers are spent accompanying her back to Wisconsin Dells. “Coming here was kind of a kind of a blessing. Melanie would always come back here every Summer. She'd bring the kids up to Wisconsin to learn their Hoocąk culture and language, and be with her mother and all her family.”
At first, Sainz would manage to break away for a week or 10 days to come up here. Eventually, he was invited by his good friend Captain Dan Soma whose family continues the legacy of the Dells Boat Tours to play on their popular Sunset Dinner cruise. “Dan is also a musician. His siblings and Melanie’s siblings all grew up together.” At the time, Dan was playing seven nights a week on the Sunset cruise and told Sainz he could use a night off. Dan said, “Why don't you do my Thursday night? I'll make it happen for you.” Sainz accepted. One night turned into three nights of performing during the full cruise season. The dinner cruise is on the Winnebago Clipper, a 100-year-old boat originally a paddle wheel steamboat that had been converted.
“The topography and the geological aspects of the Dells and the river, all make up magnificent scenery. When I play, I feel like I am a soundtrack to a show, which is the river and scenery.” Sainz shared he gets his inspiration during his performance from the scenery, whether it be a ray of sun, a tree, flower, bird, the rain, a rainbow, or the sunset. “It's a beautiful experience. Most of the time, I just consider myself background anyway.” In addition to the dinner cruises, Sainz also performs at the Brat House Grill, Con Amici Wine Bar, Vines and Rushes Winery, Springbrook and Trapper's Turn Golf, all in the Dells area.
Over the decades, Sainz has come into his own as a musician, studio musician, and singer, paying his dues, and learning from some of the best. A humbling experience at the very least. “Well, it's a gift from God, I think, and I thank God every day, for each day. For a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and the well-being of my family and all my relations. It's about love. It's not about me. I think that's what we need more of, love. If I can provide a couple of notes of music, that maybe can push somebody into that frame of mind, and for that instance make them forget their troubles or take them to a better place, take them on a journey somewhere where they were happy or in love, that’s a good thing. I'm gonna try to do the best I can, as long as I can.”
Visit Felix Sainz Jr. on the web at felixsainz.com.
