Their follow-up recording, “Obatala” (Enja) added trombonist Angel “Papo” Vasquez, guitarist Edgardo Miranda and percussionists Hector “Flaco” Hernandez, Nicky Marrero and Milton Cardona.

Their breakthrough 1989 album “Rhumba Para Monk” (now out of print), featured Monk’s music set to a dense, percussive backdrop. (Saxophonist John Stubblefield, who replaced Carter Jefferson after Jefferson died in 1993, is the group’s sixth member.)

He formed the Fort Apache Band in 1980 and the core of the group-brother Andy, keyboardist Larry Willis, saxophonist Joe Ford and drummer Steve Berrios-have been together since that time. He studied at the New York College of Music and New York University, then went on to gather a wide array of experience playing with drummer Tony Williams, keyboardist Eddie Palmieri, pianist McCoy Tyner and, most notably Dizzy Gillespie. Together with bassist and brother Andy Gonzalez, Gonzalez was active in New York’s Latin music scene while still a teenager, playing in a band led by Mongo Santamaria’s son Monguito and in the groundbreaking Conjunto Libre, which Andy formed with percussionist Manny Oquendo. My father was a singer and into jazz and he started turning me on to the music of Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong when I was 8 or 9. “Cats were holding drumming sessions in the parks and on rooftops and I used to chase after them like some kids would chase fire engines. “There was a lot of musical activity going on when I was growing up,” says Gonzalez, who now lives in Greenwich Village. The Fort Apache sound reflects its leader’s formative years in the rough-and-tumble New York borough. “What are the possibilities? Where can we take it that no one has ever taken it before?” “We’re always thinking of where the music can go,” the 47-year-old Gonzalez says. Tunes spontaneously move through African, rumba and driving, straight-ahead jazz rhythms while soloists improvise with the fire of the bebop and hard-bop progenitors. The group has pioneered a form of music that transcends the accepted Latin jazz category, exploring a variety of musical rhythms and influences, often in the course of a single Thelonious Monk cover. The six-piece Gonzalez ensemble will play the Ash Grove on the Santa Monica Pier Sept. As its name implies, trumpeter-percussionist Jerry Gonzalez’s Bronx-bred Fort Apache Band is an irreverent group of mavericks who explore the multicultural frontiers of urban jazz and Latin music.

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