THE HIP SPANIC ALLSTARS
"Keeping the sound and spirit of San Francisco's Mission District Alive!"
The San Francisco music scene has historically been a hotbed for many creative styles of music, often blending the cultural sounds of its varied population. The city’s Latino flavored Mission District is an especially fertile part of this phenomenon. The Hip Spanic AllStars were born out of this neighborhood in 2010, the product of a musical collaboration involving longtime friends and residents of the Mission, Happy Sanchez, Karl Perazzo (Santana), Norbert Stachel and Mic Gillette (Tower of Power), Dave Shul (Michael Franti and Spearhead) and Jay Lane (Primus). They all drew from their shared experiences to create an amazing blend of Latin, Jazz, Funk and World Music - mixing it all together into a melodic and rhythmic gumbo. They called their debut album "JazzyAfroLatinFunk" and named their band the Hip Spanic Allstars.
The group’s roots are derived from the 1970s Chicano rock and funk scene that brought us Santana, War and Tower of Power - classic bands that crossed cultural borders as well as musical ones. Now 7 years later, the unit that had been primarily a studio entity has finally come together to perform live! The band’s debut performance was a high-energy set at the 2017 Fillmore Street Jazz festival that Jason Olaine, the festival’s Talent Coordinator described as “Killing It!”
The core of the band’s core line up is Happy Sanchez, Shorty Ramos and Vic Castro - original members of the west coast Latin groove act Los Mocosos. The San Francisco-based Latin rock band made its debut in 1998 on Six Degrees Records. Playing a mixture of Latin ska, Afro-Cuban beats, urban hip-hop, and jazz-funk, Los Mocosos started out playing the local scene. After getting airplay on L.A.’s infamous KROQ, the band was invited to join the 1999 Watcha Tour - The Warped Tour’s first national Latin alternative tour, continuing on to play clubs and venues across the country including Washington’s Kennedy Center, L.A.’s Greek Theatre and New York City’s Central Park. The band entertained crowds stretching from the west coast’s Monterey Jazz Festival to the east coast’s Montreal Jazz Festival and toured with national acts like Los Lobos and – perhaps inevitably -- with Santana. Los Mocosos also played internationally across Europe including the legendary North Sea Jazz Festival and Australia’s Byron Bay Blues Festival.
Friends since they were 16 year old, Hip Spanic original core members Sanchez and Perazzo started creating music in 2004 for movies and television with their new project, the Latin Soul Syndicate. Over the next 6 years, the two had over 150 placements in such notable movies, TV shows and commercials as Devil Wears Prada, The Whole Ten Yards, Poseidon, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, The Ugly Truth, The Sopranos, Dexter, Criminal Minds, Ugly Betty, Justified, Bones, ER, Vegas, Desperate Housewives, Bose Electronics, Bally’s Gyms and Pepsi Cola.
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