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• Sheila E.'s official site
• Elevate Hope Foundation
• Mr. Escovedo's official site
• "Pete Escovedo's love of music runs strong in his lineage"

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Musician Sheila E. talks about performing with her family. (1:13)
 

Full Interview (24:33)
 

Tavis: Pleased to welcome music legend Pete Escovedo and Sheila E. to this program. The Grammy-nominated father and daughter are the driving force behind a fundraiser here in Southern California to benefit Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services.

If you happen to be in the L.A. area on October 18th, you can join them for a very worthy cause and a great night of music at the Vista Del Mar Jazz Fest. Pete Escovedo and Sheila E., always glad to talk to both of you.

Sheila E.: Thank you.

Pete Escovedo: Yeah, nice to be here.

Tavis: Nice to have you here. And y'all coordinated this thing tonight, didn't you? (Laughter) This is nice.

Escovedo: Yeah, how about that?

Tavis: You got to coordinate. Did y'all plan this, or it just happened that way?

Sheila E.: No, it just happened.

Tavis: I tease you all the time, Sheila. Every time I see your father, clean as the Board of Health. Every - he sleeps this way?

Sheila E.: Yeah.

Escovedo: Yeah, this is how I roll.

Tavis: That's how you roll. (Laughter)

Tavis: Every time I see your daddy, first I just want to look and see what does Mr. Escovedo have on today?

Sheila E.: Absolutely.

Tavis: He stays clean all the time.

Escovedo: That's it.

Sheila E.: Oh, no, he irons his pajamas. It's all - yeah. (Laughter)

Escovedo: Oh, yeah, man, got to do that. Can't go to bed with wrinkled pajamas, come on. (Laughter)

Tavis: Seriously, how much is style a part of what works for you on stage? It's a part of your whole stage persona, your style.

Escovedo: Well, I'm old school so when I was going to high school I met a lot of jazz musicians. We were playing together in high school. And one of the first things was the rule was like, you have to dress up. If you're going to go on stage, just like you and your show, you're not going to come on in jeans and tennis shoes, right?

Tavis: Although I have guests who do all the time. (Laughter) Not to call none of y'all out. But anyway, go ahead.

Escovedo: But it's just I think if someone's going to pay money to come and see you perform, you should look nice. And so it just got to be a real habit with me. So I try to do that all the time, and I do that with all the musicians also. If you're going to be in this band you've got to wear a suit and a tie. That's the rule.

Tavis: And obviously, not the suit and tie, but you picked up on the rule of looking glamorous on stage, I must say.

Sheila E.: I did. Absolutely, yeah. Pops has made a statement early on and he says, you got to represent. People, they respect - it's representation, first appearance, it's something very respectful about it. There's times of course I love wearing tennis shoes and jeans or sweats or whatever, but yeah, I love dressing up.

He loves dressing up. He gets excited. We're backstage and I said, "Pops, you look good." "That's how I roll." (Laughter) "That's how I roll." And I said, "You can roll with me any time."

Tavis: Speaking of rolling with him any time, the audience didn't see this, obviously, because it happened before we came on the air, but Brian, our stage manager, was saying that our director likes to get what we call "isos" - a solo shot of you, a solo shot of you, when you're talking in this conversation. So Brian was asking the two of y'all to sit not so close together so we could get these isos, and a big frown came on your face.

Sheila E.: I don't like it. (Laughter)

Tavis: You don't like sitting that far from your dad?

Sheila E.: No, because I'm always like this with my daddy, are you kidding? (Laughter)

Escovedo: That's my arm, that's my heart, right there.

Tavis: So Jonathan, I hope you're working this out. (Laughter) They're sitting almost on top of each other here. Let me talk about this Vista Del Mar project first, then I want to talk about your music and your career. Tell me about the project, Sheila, the benefit.

Sheila E.: Yeah, Vista Del Mar, we partnered with them, my manager and I started the Elevate Hope Foundation about eight years ago, so we partnered with Vista Del Mar in the last year and a half, and what we did was we started a couple programs there and songwriters symposium as well as garage band 101. What we did was we gutted out one of the facilities and redid the whole thing and furnished them with computers, everything that they need to produce and write their own pieces.

They're doing now their own PBS little kind of thing, doing shows, and it allows them to be involved with creating, and we're using music and arts as therapy to help them to create. And not only that, but express themselves.

They've never had that opportunity and that chance to do that, so now that they're doing that they're creating their own shows, they're a part of production, they're behind the scenes, they're writing their own pieces, they're writing the music as well as dialogue, and it's just been amazing. The response has been incredible.

Tavis: I was just on my radio show, Mr. Escovedo, talking to Tony Bennett, the great Tony Bennett. He and his wife Susan have started the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York some years ago, and they just moved into a brand new facility and we had them on the radio show recently talking about it. And Tony and I were in this conversation about the fact that it's a tragedy - I'm paraphrasing his words - that we have taken music education out of the schools.

Escovedo: Yes, it is.

Tavis: So here is your daughter Sheila helping to get these kids access to, exposure to music and instrumentation and now everything's so much on the computer, to your earlier point. But really just trying to give these kids an opportunity to be exposed to music.

Talk to me about what you think might be different in our country if kids were exposed to music at such an early age, the way your kids were through you, in part.

Escovedo: Well, it obviously helped me myself, coming from my dad and my mom. They loved music also. And my brothers, they all played music. But we got that early experience in school because it was available then; and now since they've taken a lot of music out of the public school system, a lot of these kids don't have the opportunity to take up music, and a lot of them want to. A lot of them are very, very talented, but they don't have the resources to do that because nowadays everything costs.

Like, you know that - everything does cost money. If you want to take lessons or buy an instrument or whatever, it takes money to do that. So with the schools taking that away from the kids, it'll be very hard for them to learn an instrument, to get involved in music. And so nowadays what's happening now is people like Sheila and myself, who are very involved with trying to help these kids to better themselves, it's a way of expressing a lot of their hurts and the disabilities that they have as growing up.

It would be an awful shame if we didn't have music for these kids to express themselves. And it's really helped them. It's an amazing tool, what music does for these kids. We've done some - actually we go to some of these poverty schools and we go to, like, detention homes, and we get with all these little kids and I know that some of them - I've had the teachers tell me, "This is going to be rough because these kids aren't going to pay attention to you."

So when we first go in we bring all the instruments and we start telling them where the instruments come from, a little history of the instrument and a little playing, and sometimes we have kids that even though they're like this and their heads are down, (laughter) but we get them, well, come and just hit the drum. And they go - all of a sudden, they - all of a sudden their eyes open up. There comes the expression.

So it's a very, very fine tool as an outlet of their feeling that they probably have kept inside because of whatever their upbringing was.

Tavis: As I sit and listen to you talk about playing the drums, or for that matter, all kind of percussion - you play whatever you want to play these days - that's not how you started, though. Your first instrument was not -

Escovedo: No, believe it or not, it was the saxophone.

Tavis: Exactly.

Escovedo: And Sheila was the violin.

Tavis: Yeah.

Escovedo: Take that, how about -

Tavis: So you started on saxophone and you started on violin and both of y'all ended up banging stuff in the end result. Sheila, when you first started playing, I know your father's obviously been very encouraging of you. Were there people who said to you, "Girls don't beat drums, that's not what girls do."

Sheila E.: (Laughs) All the time.

Tavis: You should stay with the violin. You should play the flute, but not percussion.

Sheila E.: Yeah, right?

Tavis: You heard that a lot?

Sheila E.: Yeah, yeah. I still hear it.

Tavis: Ain't nobody saying that to you these days. Not if they've ever heard you play.

Sheila E.: They don't have a clue.

Tavis: But how did you navigate past people telling you that's not what you ought to be playing?

Sheila E.: Well first of all, when I first started playing professionally - I turned professional at 15 - I had no idea that I was the only one or one of so few. I though all girls in their homes, everyone had percussion. It was just like my life. There was drums in the home all the time, so I just thought oh, okay, well, every girl plays percussion.

Until I got out playing with other artists and different people, I realized that not very many young girls played, and I got told all the time, "Well, you're not supposed to do this. This is a male instrument." And I said, "Well, who said so?" It's not a male instrument to me. I'm a young girl playing. Later on, there were many things said towards me to disqualify me or make me feel bad, to say, “Hey, you don't belong here,” and, “Hey, you know what? You're not really that good. You're just blah, blah, blah, because you know so-and-so and that's why you're here.”

Because Herbie Hancock and you're not going to last - all these crazy things. And I came to Pops and I said, "Why are they talking bad about me? I didn't even do anything. I'm just there." I'm so excited - I get into the room and start playing and I'm just happy. I'm just like - and I even thought for a while that it was an insult for people to pay me to play. I'm like, I told Pops, I said, "I don't want to get paid to play."

Tavis: You got over that, obviously.

Sheila E.: I did.

Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter)

Sheila E.: He opened the refrigerator and said -

Tavis: Yeah, somebody got to eat, yeah.

Sheila E.: We don't want to roll like this.

Tavis: You got past that real fast. Pardon the sexist nature of the question, but I'm trying to get at something here. I hope it's not sexist, seriously. And I'm obviously not a percussionist; I don't know anything about it, so I'm just asking a question. Are there things about - are there issues when it comes to playing drums that you have to overcome or compensate for because you are a woman?

I'm thinking about dexterity, I'm thinking about speed, I'm thinking about Questlove banging this thing real - and I'm just trying to figure out if there are things as a woman that you had to compensate for, does that make sense?

Sheila E.: Yeah. First of all -

Tavis: Or conversely, is there something that as a woman you get a chance to do better than most guys do who play drums?

Sheila E.: Absolutely.

Tavis: Okay. (Laughter) Okay, the question is all yours now.

Sheila E.: No, let me go back, though, because really it started a long time ago when I didn't even know that it could be a possibility of them saying to me it is a male-type instrument, because in Africa there are these drums that only men can play. Women are not allowed to play these drums because there's a certain religion part of it that they speak to the gods and there's things that have to do with just men that women are not allowed to be able to play these drums.

So I got that part of it, but I said, "I don't want to play those drums. I want to play the other ones that I know I can play." I don't have to play those; I'll play these that my dad plays. And after a while I started playing, it was fine. But again, it was - for me, the hardest part was it's very, very demanding to play. Very demanding to play congas.

First of all, if you go outside and beat on that brick wall, that's what it feels like. Beat on a brick wall for about 20 minutes and when you start tearing up you know what it feels like to be a percussionist, because that's how bad it hurts.

Tavis: But your nails.

Sheila E.: See, now (unintelligible). (Laughter) We wouldn't want them to.

Tavis: Yeah, how do you feel about tearing your nails up?

Sheila E.: Yeah, I've broken nails and it is painful. But it's not as painful as you build up calluses on your hands, and because I'm a woman it's like I don't want to grab your hand you go, "Girl, take your hand off me." (Laughter) So it was a process of me trying to keep my hands as smooth as possible, to continue to be feminine.

I had to shave it down with a razor blade, there were blood clots, I would be bleeding and all that stuff. But then there was something that again, I had no idea. But there's percussion players, a lot of them even now, that play every single day, and when you're playing, it's a thing about beating your hands against a drum.

When you're playing like that it's not drums, it's percussion like this. So when you beat your hands what happens to your body is your system shuts down in a way where you get these blood clots but then it reverses, and a lot of the men that play percussion urinate blood.

Escovedo: Mm-hmm, they do.

Sheila E.: Now, I didn't get that because I stopped playing. After a while I couldn't take it anymore. That's when I had started playing more timbales and drums, because that hurts. So overall I had to go through some process, but I think there's a lot of things that I changed that a lot of the men were doing and I was figuring out a way to get someone's attention by saying, I know I can play really fast and I've got chops like a guy, but I don't think anybody's going to wear a skirt with heels and kick the cymbal, turn around, flip the stick, catch it, and say, "Hey, what's up."

Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) Take that. That's the other part of that question. There is something you bring that the brothers just can't do. How did you end up on the congas, Mr. Escovedo, when you started with the saxophone? How'd you make that switch? How'd you know this was your real (unintelligible)?

Escovedo: Well, when I was in high school there was one of my friends who played piano. He was starting a group, a little Latin jazz group. So I heard about it, I wanted to play, naturally, so I said, "Well, I'd like to join the band." He says, "Well, what do you play?" I said, "I play saxophone." He goes, "Man, I already got a saxophone player," he says, "But I really need a percussion player." I said, "Hey, I can do that." (Laughter) I wanted to play so bad, I didn't care.

Tavis: But you were not playing percussion at that point, though.

Escovedo: No, no, I wasn't. But I used to kind of dib and dab, I saw guys playing and I said, "This is pretty cool." The only reason I thought saxophone would be great, all the jazz sax players get all the girls.

Tavis: That's right.

Escovedo: I said, "That would be cool." (Laughter) That's a good thing. That's number one. And I became very interested in it, I said, "I really like the music," and because I wanted to play jazz, but then I liked the rhythm part of it, of the Latin stuff, so that's why I went to Latin jazz.

Tavis: I'm sitting here listening to you and I hate people like you. (Laughter) It just seems cosmically unfair that a guy says, "I already got a sax player, I need a percussionist," "Okay, I'll do that," and you switch to that and the rest, as they say, is history and you become a legend with what you switch to. (Laughter) That just seems so unfair.

Escovedo: I told you, that's the way I roll. (Laughter)

Tavis: It just seems cosmically unfair. When you all play, obviously you guys, the two of you and other family members do your own things and play with other people. We know all these famous collaborations with others outside of your family. But when you all play together as a family, do you guys rehearse together, you get on stage and you just look at each other? How does that work when you play as a family, Sheila?

Sheila E.: I don't even know the last time we rehearsed. I think it was when we all lived together 30 years ago. No, we just get on stage and we start playing. We look at each other, we can tell if Pops is going to go somewhere and not - sometimes he'll break it down and then he'll just kind of go into something, then we just get off of our instruments, come up to him, we'll start grabbing water bottles, playing, whatever. It just becomes its own thing.

I think just being around each other for so long, especially because when it started for us it was in the house. Pops was practicing every day to records. All he did was practice every day to records, and then if he wasn't practicing to records, then the bands would come over and then he'd have jam sessions all the time.

So there was always - every day was a party at the house - every day. And we moved a lot, because we got loud. (Laughter) Yeah.

Tavis: You got kicked out of a lot of places, huh?

Escovedo: Yeah, we had to move a lot.

Tavis: You got evicted a few times?

Escovedo: We got the notes in the mail. "Shut up, stop (unintelligible)." (Laughter)

Tavis: How could you - obviously it's worked out okay, but how could you allow your kids to go into an industry where you knew how much you had to struggle to make it happen?

Escovedo: Well, at first, especially I didn't want Sheila in it, but when she was playing the violin, I thought, oh great, I've got a daughter that's going to go into the symphony and play violin. But when she switched over to drums and percussion and all of that, and the boys at that time, they were - my sons, Juan and Peter Michael, they were actually more into sports so I didn't think they were going to become musicians.

But little did I know, because I had all the instruments in the garage, they were going down there every day and just playing and playing and playing. So then when they all started to come into it I said, "Well, I don't know if this is a good idea for them because it's very hard." I struggled through a lot of, lot of years coming up in this business and it is very difficult.

And so I didn't want them - you're right, I didn't want them to go through the stuff that I had to go through. But once I started hearing them play and how sincere they were about playing music and that they were really adapting themselves and really pushing themselves to be better and better and better, and as the years went by I saw how serious they were about it and how much they really wanted to play it, and the fact that they all turned out great, they just really applied themselves.

So I was cautious and leery about it; and me and my wife talked it over, about well, do we want the kids to follow in your footsteps in this profession? But being that they were so sincere about it, their love of it was - I said okay, if this is what they really want to do then that's fine, we'll just let them go. They all did very well.

Tavis: I introduced you as a legend when we started this conversation 15, 20 minutes ago. When you get to the level of expertise that you have, is it your assessment that you can still get better at your age now, as long as you've been doing this? Can you still get better, and if so, at what?

To the untrained ear, how would I know that you're getting better anyway? But do you feel like you can still get better at the timbale?

Escovedo: Well, I try to get better, although I've slowed down quite a bit. The age starts - it's like a ballplayer or a professional athlete that knows, in a sense, when you're taking two steps to get to the next step. So it becomes a little difficult for me. The traveling wears me down a little bit and the night after night performance kind of wears me out.

But for the most part I feel that I've been very healthy, been blessed with my health and that I'm able, at this age, to still be doing what I'm doing. At this point right now I can't see myself doing anything else. I don't know how to do anything else, unless I become a talk show host. That would be easier.

Tavis: No, no, no, no. You stay right over there. I got this.

Escovedo: Yeah, you got that.

Tavis: This is how I roll. (Laughter) This is how I roll, and you stay over - this is all I know how to do, so we'd both be out of work if we didn't have these opportunities.

Sheila, it's impossible to look at your body of work, and certainly for a lot of your fan base not celebrate the fact that when you and that genius, Prince, hooked up it really put you - it took him to a whole nother stratosphere. As you look back now, you guys have been friends for years, of course, look back on how that relationship came to be and in your own words explain what that meant for your career, connecting with him.

Sheila E.: It was kind of funny, because I was pretty well known in the recording industry because I recorded with so many people, I had performed with so many giants at an early age that he was actually following my career and I had no idea. So when I first met him, when I went to turn around to say hello to him and introduce myself, he said, "I already know who you are." And I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, you're Sheila Escovedo," and I said, "Yeah."

He says, "I've been following you forever, you've been playing with George Duke, Herbie Hancock." I was playing with everyone. So we became friends and the thing was is that growing up listening to Latin jazz, playing Latin jazz music, but also being in school listening to Motown, there were so many different types of music in my house.

And then Pops wanted me to play classical music, so I had pretty much everything. At one point in time I was on the last tour with Marvin Gaye and the beginning tour of Lionel Ritchie in '81, and he was coming to all the shows. He was coming to Marvin Gaye, he was coming to Lionel Ritchie, and he said, "Why do you still want to play behind people?" And I said, "Because I enjoy it." I don't need to be the focus, out front. I like supporting people. I have a great time.

He says, "Why don't you do a record?" I said, "Oh, yeah, sure, I'll just do a record." He says, "No, I can make it happen." I said, "Okay." He says, "You have some music?" "Sure I do." "Okay, play it for me." And I swear it was like the next week my record was out. (Laughter) It seemed like it was that - we went (makes noise) and there it was. It just - poof, it was there.

We did the record really quickly and it did change, because what happened was growing up listening to Latin jazz, and that's who I was, the other side of me was I loved commercial music and I thought about possibly being an artist but not sure. I signed as an R&B artist to Warner Brothers at that time and signing as an R&B artist, but then I crossed over to pop because "Glamorous Life" became so popular that then it changed to something else.

So it opened up a big door, the beginning of then the commercial side of being a musician, but not only a musician who loves Latin jazz, it's my roots, but also then being in an industry where I was recognized as someone who was different, who was not sure what nationality they were.

Everyone adapted to me as they claimed me for - if my hair was curly, oh, she's Puerto Rican. She's Latin. My hair's straight, or whatever. It changed and it opened up a door to be very commercial and be someone who was different.

Who's going to give someone a record deal - a woman a record deal who's playing timbales who half the people don't even know what that is, and front their own band and play R&B kind of funky music? That doesn't even make sense. Why would they want to do it? But because of Prince, that door was opened and it allowed me to do many, many things after that.

Tavis: Again, it's impossible to look at the two of you and not see the love and how important family is. For every daughter who's watching right now whose father is still living, you say what to them about your relationship?

Sheila E.: Whoo, man, you're going to make me cry. You know what, it's - you are going to make - I'm not going to cry. No, I love my dad so much; it's an honor and a privilege, first of all, to be able to perform with him. It's something special that I have that I don't think a lot of people get to experience. It really is something totally different.

I take every single day as if it's my last because we've been through so much together. I love him and support him so much and even besides the music part of it, just to be able to have a dad that is still living, that him and my mom are still married and they still love each other and we all still talk to each other, God is first, Christ is first, and after that then is family, and everything else is a piece of cake. So if I didn't have this, I don't know who I would be. I really don't.

Tavis: Can't close on a better note than that.

Escovedo: Thank you.

Tavis: Yeah, cannot close on a better note than that. Sheila, always glad to see you.

Sheila E.: Thank you so much.

Tavis: Mr. Escovedo, always glad to see you as well.

Escovedo: Thank you so much. Great to see you.

Tavis: If you didn't hear at the top of the show, the Vista Del Mar project they're working on, go to the website at PBS.org, type in my name, and we'll get you all the information you need if you're in L.A. around October the 18th.