Danny Flores got the call inviting him to play the biggest show of his life at midnight about a month ago.
“Danny, I need you at the Super Bowl!” Roland Gajate Garcia, a friend and colleague, yelled excitedly to the Frost School of Music alum.
“I just said ‘yes, I’m there,’” Flores remembers. “That’s what we do as musicians. We say yes, and then we figure it out.”
And that’s how Flores found himself taking the field in the Super Bowl LX halftime show with a group of percussionists from across the Americas, playing alongside superstar Bad Bunny in the electrifying climax of a spectacle that riveted over 70,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Levi’s Stadium and 135 million people around the world.
Although he’s built a successful career as a GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY-winning music director, producer, and songwriter, for his moment with the world’s most famous artist, Flores joined 29 other similarly accomplished musicians as a plenero, playing a handheld drum in the percussive Puerto Rican folk music genre called plena, intrinsic to family parties and neighborhood parades called parrandas. It is one of many traditional styles from the island that Bad Bunny incorporated in his megahit “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which won the GRAMMY for album of the year.
Flores, who graduated from Frost Online in 2022 with a master’s in music industry, started as a pianist in church and his father’s salsa band in Orlando. But growing up in Puerto Rico, Flores, like many musicians on the island, began playing the pandero, the distinctive tambourine-like drum central to plena, when he was around six years old. “It’s customary to grow up playing it,” he said.
Rehearsals started in Los Angeles two weeks before the Super Bowl, and were kept strictly secret. Because performers had to give up their cell phones for the daylong practice sessions, both for security and to ensure that everyone stayed focused, Flores missed the news that he had won his first GRAMMY, for best Latin rock or alternative album, during the awards on Feb. 1. “We got our phones back around 6 pm and I was like ‘wow, ok, I won a GRAMMY,’” Flores said. The other musicians celebrated his triumph by playing bomba y plena as they walked out to the street.
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Garcia, a percussionist and producer who’s worked with Bad Bunny, as well as playing on shows like “American Idol” and for artists like Stevie Wonder and J Balvin, brought together musicians from multiple countries for the segment, including beloved Puerto Rican ensemble Los Pleneros de la Cresta, with Flores assisting him.
“There were percussionists from Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina,” Flores said. “There were African-Americans. One of them was part Native American.”
“Our group of 30 percussionists reflected [Bad Bunny’s] message of being unified by music and by love and by a greater purpose that goes beyond our talents,” said Flores, becoming audibly overcome with emotion. “It was really bigger than us.”
As rehearsals moved to the stadium, guest Ricky Martin, an earlier culture-shifting Puerto Rican star who ignited pop music’s ‘Latin Explosion’ with 1999's “Livin' La Vida Loca,” joined them for run-throughs. Flores praised Bad Bunny’s professionalism, even as the star dealt with massive attention for his historic GRAMMY win and Super Bowl show. “He was incredibly focused, there rehearsing with us from day one,” Flores said. “He’s carrying the whole performance, but he was very systematic, went through everything, asked questions.”
Flores was also impressed watching the rehearsals with Lady Gaga, a guest star who performed her duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile,” orchestrated as a salsa. “She was so sharp with her vocal performance, her choreography, her energy,” said Flores. “You could feel how intense she is and how much she cares. It was really cool to see that.”
The Super Bowl show included a contribution from another Frost School alumnus, Carlos “Carlitos” Lopez—an orchestral version of Bad Bunny’s hit “Monaco” featuring two lines of violinists (from multi-GRAMMY winning group Mariachi Divas, among the many immigrant artists and everyday people featured throughout the show) framing Bad Bunny, which Lopez composed for an orchestra he led accompanying the artist’s 2024 tour.
The show was a dizzying experience for Flores. “Stepping onto that field with Benito, with everyone watching and the expectation of a Super Bowl performance, was a very powerful moment,” said Flores, using the first name of the artist whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio. And a brief one. He and the other musicians extended the moment by playing and dancing into the street, with Flores out front carrying the Puerto Rican flag. “We’re walking out of the stadium, mission accomplished, everyone full of adrenaline,” Flores said. “It became this huge street party.”
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He said that Bad Bunny made sure to thank everyone. “Benito not only comes to our dressing room, but he visits the dancers, he visits the audio engineers,” Flores said. “He really is an incredible human being who cares about his people. That’s characteristic of him—his care for the people who surround him and make him look and sound good.”
In a way, Flores said, that incandescent, fleeting performance moment captured the meaning of the song “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which ended the show.
“It means ‘I should have taken more photos,’ but it’s more ‘I should have remembered, I should have looked back at where we were going, I should have been there with my family, I should have been more present,’” Flores said. “The symbolism is to be present with our neighbors, with our communities, to have more love and compassion and grace for each other. He is really promoting a message of love. That’s the goal – for us to come together as human beings.”
Flores also came away from this transcendent experience with some practical advice: always do your best. Garcia knew Flores from the music industry, and because Flores hired Garcia to play at the 2024 Latin GRAMMY Person of the Year gala, where Flores was music supervisor and also brought in Frost School students to perform.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re just there to bring coffee or play a cowbell,” said Flores. “You always want to put your best foot forward, to have good intentions and great energy in everything you do. Because you never know if that person is the one who’s going to cast you in the Super Bowl.”
