Pancho Molina

Francisco Molina Cornejo was born in Concepción on 25 May 1969. Everyone calls him Pancho. He started playing drums as a teenager listening to Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey — three drummers still audible in everything he plays.

He was a student at the Instituto de Humanidades when he met Álvaro Henríquez and Roberto «Titae» Lindl, who went to the Charles de Gaulle school. Old-school rock and roll was what they had in common. Those rehearsals became Dick Stones, and Dick Stones became Los Tres, with a pact to move to Santiago and make a living from music.

In 1991 he joined the Ángel Parra Trío alongside Ángel Parra and Titae Lindl, recording their self-titled album in 1992 and staying with the group until 1994. It was his first openly jazz project and it opened a parallel path he never closed.

In 1995 he started his own band, Los Titulares, releasing three albums between 1998 and 2003: swing, bop and improvisation, played in small clubs while Los Tres was filling arenas.

The first chapter of Los Tres closed in 2000 with the farewell concerts and the album Freno de mano. Molina moved to the United States: he took the Professional Music Program at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and went on to build a long professional stretch between Boston and New York.

He returned to Concepción in 2016, where he runs Estudio La Madre, his recording and music production studio. He works there as a producer, teaches, and keeps recording.

In 2023 Los Tres reunited its original line-up after more than two decades. Then came the La Revuelta tour, the live album Revuelta En Vivo in 2025 and, in 2026, XCLNT, recorded at Studio 2 at Abbey Road in London.

He currently divides his work between Los Tres, the Pancho Molina Trio, music production and Estudio La Madre in Concepción.