For the Garcias, Music’s Always a Family Affair : Jazz: The band thinks much of its success comes from being kin. ‘It’s like ballplayers,’ one brother says. ‘The better they know each other, the better they work together.’

The Garcia Brothers didn’t start out playing Latin jazz. It took conguero Poncho Sanchez to influence the three siblings--bassist Raul, pianist-arranger Robert and timbale player Rudy--to abandon their careers as straight jazz musicians and to turn to the world of salsa and Afro-Cuban sounds.

“The first band we had,” Raul recently recalled, “was a trio that played the basic standards and contemporary jazz tunes. We picked up on Horace Silver, the Crusaders. . . . Those were the kinds of people we emulated, dissected and studied.”

But when they heard Sanchez in 1978 “playing the Latin stuff, it blew us away. We kept saying, ‘We’ve got to start doing this music and get back to our roots.’ ”

As it turned out, “moving into the Latin field was easy. Because we had studied jazz, we had a sense of the music; jazz prepared us for the structure and harmony that you find in Latin music. And the rhythms, well, we had that Latin jazz thing in our blood.”

Today the three brothers lead a nine-member band modeled after Sanchez’s successful octet. The ninth member, guitarist Bobby Redfield, has close ties to Sanchez, having played in his first ensembles.

Raul remembers meeting “Bobby through our conga player, Rolando Mendoza, who introduced us in ’86 or ’87. Bobby had some guys cancel on a New Year’s Eve gig and asked my brother Robert to sit in. He asked Robert if he knew anyone who played bass, and Robert said, ‘Yeah, my brother plays bass.’ Then he said he needed a timbale player, and Robert said, ‘Yeah, my other brother plays timbales.’ Later that week, he offered us the gig full time. He put us to work for three years. Now we return the favor.”

“I play with them when I can,” said Redfield, who still leads his own quintet in the area. “My group is more like what Cal Tjader did, with some bossa nova and Brazilian music thrown in. Their group is more like Tito (Puente) and Poncho with full rhythm section and horns playing more Cuban and Puerto Rican styles. With my small group, I can call standards or boleros, and the guys know what to do. There’s more orchestration and chart reading with the big (Garcia Brothers) band.”

The Garcia Brothers’ connections to Sanchez go beyond his having inspired them, and their subsequently having sat in with him. Arranger Robert studied with pianist Charles Otwell, who did the majority of the arranging for the Sanchez band during its first eight years.

Otwell was introduced to Sanchez by none other than Redfield.

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As family, the Garcias are comfortable with this tightknit quality of the Latin jazz clique. Indeed, Raul thinks a lot of their success has to do with their being related.

“It’s like ballplayers,” he said. “The better they know each other, the better they work together. And the instincts we have for what each other is doing, because we’ve known each other for our entire lives, always has us thinking along the same lines.”

Rudy and Raul are 40-year-old twins; Robert is a year older. Their uncle, Rudy Garcia, was a professional piano player who led a trio in the Los Angeles area.

“Our dad also played a little bit of piano,” said Raul, “but he was best at emphasizing the technical side of the music--and instilling discipline. He often told us we couldn’t go out and play ball until we practiced our instruments.”

The brothers began their musical pursuits when Rudy and Raul were 8 and Robert was 9. “We came home from the ballpark one day,” Raul said, “and there were three little accordions lined up on the floor for us. And my dad said, ‘There they are. You start lessons tomorrow.’ ”

From there, all three brothers moved on to piano. Raul moved on to guitar and then picked up the bass in the late ‘70s, when the brothers’ band needed a bassist.

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Redfield, 56, also started at age 8, but he was a guitarist from the start. He also, as a teen-ager, worked at the Fender Guitar plant in La Habra and played with Ellis Marsalis--the father of Wynton, Branford and Delfeayo--when Marsalis was stationed at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in the ‘50s. “There used to be a little jam session in Santa Ana at a little Mexican restaurant called the Casa Grande, and Ellis would come down and play with us,” Redfield said. “He was a real teacher even then. I was having trouble playing ‘ ‘Round Midnight’ and he showed me how to play it the right way.”

Redfield went on to make a living playing with various R&B; bands, hooked up with the Righteous Brothers in the early ‘60s and spent five years touring with Bill Medley after the brothers went their separate ways. He also played with saxophonist Art Pepper and studied with the revered be-bop pianist Joe Albany.

Then, one fateful night in 1972, he sat in with the late bandleader Cal Tjader. “It changed my whole outlook on music and was the beginning of my Latin jazz career,” Redfield said.

The Garcia Brothers, featuring Redfield, will release their first recording next month on the Dos Coronas label, a subsidiary of A&M.;

* The Garcia Brothers, featuring Bobby Redfield, play Friday at 9 p.m. at Cafe Lido, 501 30th St., Newport Beach. (714) 675-2968.