Pancho Céspedes tours the US East Coast ahead of his Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

Foto: Wikimedia Commons / Fotopex (CC BY-SA 3.0), 2012 file photo

October 29, 2026

Francisco "Pancho" Céspedes, the Santa Clara-born singer-songwriter who has lived in Mexico since 1992, is on a US East Coast tour. After an October 24 show at Desafinados in Miami, the "Vida Loca" singer returned on October 28 to SOB's in New York, the venue where he played a well-remembered concert in 2001.

According to the schedule released by the promoters, the tour continues October 29 at the Radio Hotel in New York (listed by Live Nation as rescheduled), October 30 at the BarCode Entertainment Complex in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and October 31 at McVinnie Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, with guests Miguel and Yosan. The set list includes songs such as "Vida Loca," "Pensar en Ti" and "Dónde Está la Vida."

The shows lead up to one of the biggest honors of his career. In June, The Latin Recording Academy announced that Céspedes will receive its 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award, alongside Alaska, Lila Downs, Daniela Mercury and Chichí Peralta. The honorees will be celebrated on November 9 during Latin GRAMMY Week in Las Vegas.

The Academy noted that Céspedes gave up medicine for music, wrote songs for Luis Miguel, collaborated with Alejandro Sanz and Plácido Domingo, and has been nominated for a Latin GRAMMY several times.

Fuente: Alternativa Caribe, The Latin Recording Academy, SOB's, Tickeri

Francisco Fabián Céspedes Rodríguez

Singer, Musician, Composer

Pancho Céspedes knew from a very young age that he had to abandon his medical career to focus on what really made his blood flow: music. The rhythm and all the romanticism he carried within had to flow somehow, and what better way to show his experiences than through his songs. For this reason, for several years, he was part of some Cuban groups such as Pucho López's group (with which he visited Spain for the first time in the early 1990s) and the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, a group with which he sang songs both of his own authorship and "feeling" — a music movement that emerged in Cuba, which is a mixture of bolero with jazz and with which they performed throughout his country — to finally arrive in Mexico, where he decides to settle and begin a career in music.