Cleto Escobedo III, longtime crew chief of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show has died, Jimmy Kimmel announced Tuesday. He was 59 years old.
Late night talk show host mourned the death of one of his old friends, whom he met when he was 9 years old, who wrote the following on Instagram:
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Escobedo and Kimmel met as children in Las Vegas, where they grew up across the street from each other. Kimmel wrote on Tuesday that the two are “inseparable.”
“We just met one day on the street, and there were some kids on the street, and he and I became very close friends and had a similar sense of humor. We just became buddies, and we've been buddies ever since,” Escobedo said in a 2022 interview with the Texas Tech University Southwestern Collection oral history archive, revealing that he and Kimmel were big David Letterman fans growing up.
Escobedo would grow up to become a professional musician, specializing in saxophone and touring with Phillip Bailey and Paula Abdul of Earth, Wind and Fire. He recorded with Marc Anthony, Tom Scott and Take Six. When Kimmel had his own late-night talk show on ABC in 2003, he lobbied Escobedo to lead the house band on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Of course I wanted great musicians, but I wanted to have chemistry with somebody,” Kimmel told WABC in 2015. “And there’s no one in my life that I have better chemistry with than him.”
In 2016, on Escobedo's 50th birthday, Kimmel dedicated a segment to his friend, recalling playing pranks with a BB gun or spying on people in the backseat of his mom's car.
“Cleto had a bicycle with a stroller attached to it. We called it a side hack. I would sit in the stroller and then Cleto would take me straight into trash cans and bushes,” Kimmel recalled.
News of Escobedo's death came after an episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Thursday. was suddenly cancelled. Guests on the show included David Duchovny, Joe Keery and Madison Beer. The date and cause of Escobedo's death were not immediately known.
Escobedo's father is also a member of Kimmel's house band and plays tenor and alto saxophone. In January 2022 father-son duo celebrated almost two decades of collaboration on screen.
“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 came to us and stuff before he was famous, just to support me and stuff. I invited him to concerts, and if he had nothing to do, he came to watch, so that he knew my guys,” Escobedo said in a 2022 interview. “Then he just said, ‘Hey man, what about your dad? Wouldn't that be cool? I thought, “That would be really cool.”
In a 2022 interview, Escobedo said being a bandleader has one major benefit: time with family.
“Touring and all that stuff is fun, but it's more of a young person's game. Touring isn't very conducive to family life either. I've learned over the years, being on the road and seeing how hard it is to leave your kids for so long. Sometimes they're babies; you come back and then they talk, it's like, 'What?'” he said.
Escobedo's survivors also include his wife, Lori, and two children.
