By Mark Kennedy | Related Press
Late-night speak present host Jimmy Kimmel is mourning the demise of one in all his oldest associates — his present’s bandleader, Cleto Escobedo III.
Kimmel introduced Escobedo’s demise Tuesday on Instagram, saying “that we are heartbroken is an understatement.” Escobedo was 59.
Escobedo and Kimmel met as kids in Las Vegas, the place they grew up throughout the road from one another.
“We just met one day on the street, and there were a few kids on the street, and him and I just became really close friends, and we kind of had the same sense of humor. We just became pals, and we’ve been pals ever since,” Escobedo stated in a 2022 interview for Texas Tech College’s Southwest Assortment oral historical past archive, disclosing that he and Kimmel had been big followers of David Letterman as youngsters.
Escobedo would develop as much as turn into an expert musician, specializing within the saxophone, and touring with Earth, Wind and Fireplace’s Phillip Bailey and Paula Abdul. He recorded with Marc Anthony, Tom Scott and Take Six. When Kimmel received his personal ABC late-night speak present in 2003, he lobbied for Escobedo to guide the home band on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Of course I wanted great musicians, but I wanted somebody I had chemistry with,” Kimmel instructed WABC in 2015. “And there’s nobody in my life I have better chemistry with than him.”
In 2016, on Escobedo’s fiftieth birthday, Kimmel devoted a phase to his buddy, recalling pranks with a BB gun or mooning folks from the again of his mother’s automobile.
“Cleto had a bicycle with a sidecar attached to it. We called it the side hack. I would get in the sidecar and then Cleto would drive me directly into garbage cans and bushes,” Kimmel recalled.
Escobedo’s father can be a member of the Kimmel home band and performs tenor and alto saxophones. In January 2022, the father-son duo celebrated practically twenty years of performing on-screen collectively.
“Jimmy asked me, ‘Who are we going to get in the band?’ I said, ‘Well, my normal guys,’ and he knew my guys because he had been coming to see us and stuff before he was famous, just to come support me and whatever. I’d invite him to gigs, and if he didn’t have anything to do he’d come check it out, so he knew my guys,” Escobedo recounted within the 2022 interview. “Then he just said, ‘Hey, man, what about your dad? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?’ I was like, ‘That would be way cool.’”
Within the 2022 interview, Escobedo stated the bandleader job had one main profit: household time.
“Touring and all that stuff is fun, but it’s more of a young man’s game. Touring, also, too, is not really conducive for family life. I’ve learned over the years, being on the road and watching how hard it is, leaving your kids for so long. Sometimes they’re babies; you come back and then they’re talking, it’s like, ‘What?’” he stated.
Escobedo’s survivors additionally embrace his spouse Lori and their two kids.
“The fact that we got to work together every day is a dream neither of us could ever have imagined would come true. Cherish your friends and please keep Cleto’s wife, children and parents in your prayers,” Kimmel wrote.
