Based in New York since 1999, the Mexican drummer released, in 2007, his first work as leader, - the album Migration, featuring participations of Pat Metheny, Chris Potter and Chick Corea – and since then has engaged in a consistent and ambitious creative path that was decisively marked by the soundtrack he composed for the film Birdman. In most recent years, Sánchez has worked in several distinct projects such as the trio Three Times Three, on his solo album Bad Hombre and the collaboration with composer and arranger Vince Mendoza and the German jazz orchestra WDR.

In Guimarães Jazz, Antonio Sánchez will play with his project Migration, a quintet founded in 2011 with the intention of exploring an aesthetical language with approximations to rock, electronic music and spoken word. The first album of the band, the critically well-praised The Meridian Suite is a single piece composed of five different movements in which a pattern of circularity surfaces in the shape of recurring themes and motifs intended to create a narrative. Lines in the Sand, Sánchez’s most recent work with the band Migration and which will be the centre of their performance at Guimarães Jazz is, according to Sánchez himself, an homage to the United States of America’s history of emigration and a celebration of the ethnic diversity which made possible the edification of this country’s remarkable musical patrimony. At the same time, it gives proof of a composer who is aware of his surrounding reality and of the importance of preserving historical memory against the protectionist and nationalist drift that dominate the ideological and cultural environment of contemporary world.