Jimmy Kimmel paid homage to his late best friend and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” band leader, Cleto Escobedo III, during the “hardest” opening monologue the late-night host said he ever had to deliver.
Kimmel broke down in tears on Tuesday night’s show as he shared intimate details about his “great friend, father, son, musician and man” Escobedo, who died earlier that morning at age 59.
“We’ve been on the air for almost 23 years and I’ve had to do some hard monologues along the way, but this one’s the hardest because late last night, early this morning, we lost someone very special who was much too young,” the 57-year-old late-night host told his audience.
“In 1997, my family moved to Las Vegas. My parents sold our house in Brooklyn, and we moved 3,000 miles across the country.”
Kimmel said he met Escobedo when he and his family left Brooklyn and moved 3,000 miles west to Las Vegas. Escobedo lived just a few houses down from where Kimmel moved to in Spring Valley.
“He was a year older than me. His name was Cleto, but we called him Junior,” he said, adding that they first met while he was riding his bike around the neighborhood.
The two instantly became best friends from there on and would regularly have sleepovers at each other’s homes, Kimmel said, noting that at one point he slept over Escobedo’s home “33 nights in a row.”
Kimmel said one thing he’ll never forget about Escobedo was that he “was a phenomenal sax player from a very young age.”
“He was a child prodigy who would get standing ovations in junior high school if you could believe that,” he said.
Escobedo gained his love for music from his sax-playing father Cleto Escobedo II — who is also a part of the show’s in-house band, “Cleto and the Cletones” — but gave up his career as a musician to focus on his family when he was younger.
“So when Cleto Jr. became a professional musician, Cleto Senior was thrilled. He got to live vicariously through his son, who started playing in bars, and clubs, and lounges around Las Vegas,” Kimmel said.
Escobedo was eventually hired to play sax for pop star Paula Abdul and was later signed to a record deal, under which he released his first album.
Kimmel said the album didn’t succeed because Escobedo, a “serious musician” with a passion for jazz and R&B, wasn’t cut out for pop stardom and soon returned to touring with Marc Anthony, Philip Bailey, and other artists.
In 2002, Kimmel landed his talk show and was told he needed a band.
He said he knew he wanted his childhood best pal to be its leader and also wanted Escobedo’s father to be part of the group, despite him not having played professionally for nearly three decades.
“When you do a show like this, you need a few things,” Kimmel said. “You need a desk, an announcer, a Guillermo, and you need a band. Of course, I wanted Cleto to lead my band. We grew up watching Dave (Letterman) and Paul (Shaffer) and the idea that anyone other than him would lead the band was terrifying. It had to be him.”
After the talented father-and-son duo and their talented band nailed an audition that Kimmel set up with ABC bigwigs at a restaurant gig, executive Lloyd Braun “loved it,” and “Cleto and the Cletones” was born — with the late-night host noting that since then, they have all been “working together every day for almost 23 years.”
“I’ve often said that the single best thing about doing this show was getting the opportunity to allow Cleto Senior to pick up where he left off in 1966 and become a musician again with his son,” Kimmel said, fighting back tears as the crowd gave Escobedo’s father a standing ovation.
Kimmel also introduced Escobedo’s mother, who was in the crowd for Tuesday night’s show.
“[Cleto] Senior and Sylvia, Cleto’s mom, have been like second parents to me,” he said, struggling to keep his composure.
The late-night host then emotionally vented about the pain he felt from losing his closest friend.
“Everyone loves Cleto. Everyone here at the show. We are devastated by this. It’s not… It’s just not fair,” a choked-up Kimmel said. “Even though I’m heartbroken to lose him, I’m going to take yet another lesson from him and acknowledge how lucky I was to have him literally at my side for so many years.”
Kimmel announced Escobedo’s death on Tuesday morning in an Instagram post.
A cause of death was not announced, but Page Six reports that he had complications stemming from a liver transplant.
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