A little more than a quarter-century ago, Mexican musician Leonel Garcia and Argentinian-Mexican artist Noel Schajris were pursuing individual solo careers when their shared record label, Sony Music, set them up on a blind date of sorts. And as soon as Schajris got a look at Garcia’s CD shelf, it was clear that these two soul music fans were creative soulmates. And thus, the duo Sin Bandera was born.

“That was the way you get to know someone back in the day. [You see someone’s] the record collection and you’re like, ‘I think I’m going to get along with this guy,’” Schajris chuckles, sitting with Garcia at Los Angeles’s Licorice Pizza Records to promote their most emotional album yet, Escenas, and their current tour, which includes a date at L.A.’s Forum on Sept. 27. “When I arrived at his home, he had his CD rack and he had a Kevon Edmonds CD. And I said, ‘How do you have this one?’”

“It was weird,” Garcia laughingly recalls. “They told me, ‘There’s this guy that sings R&B like you, in Spanish.’ That was weird because we’re talking about ‘99, 2000, and in Mexico, that was not a common thing to see — someone listening to Maxwell or Babyface’s MTV Unplugged at that time. Not too many people [in Latin America] were into R&B.”

“So, from the get-go… it was not, ‘Oh, how are we going to make this work?’ No, no. [Sin Bandera] was born like that,” Schajris asserts.

“It was like something that happens for a reason. I’m not very into the mystical side of things, but when you enter somebody’s house and they have the same albums you have in a very weird manner, you feel there’s something you have to investigate there,” says Garcia. “That was the first thing that made us think we could do something.”

Garcia and Schajris ended up writing three songs on that fateful day, and by 2001 they were releasing Sin Bandera’s self-titled debut album, which sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. They went on to earn seven Latin Grammy nominations (winning two), and they eventually even got to collaborate with some of their R&B idols, like Brian McKnight (which made them “super-nervous”) and John Legend. But they initially faced much industry resistance, because they didn’t neatly fit into one radio genre.

“It was a nightmare for the promoters. … They didn’t know where to put us,” Schajris recalls. “It was kind of the challenge of doing that kind of thing because it was unheard-of, but also it was a thing that make us special. … We were like the Simon & Garfunkel Latinos!”

Garcia thinks Sin Bandera have always been more like Latin America’s answer to Air Supply, because “the kind of audience we have that is very romantic, soft music.”

“There have been a lot of birthing situations because of our songs,” Schajris jokes.

“Yeah, if you need a population [boost] in your cities, just take us there,” Garcia laughs.

It makes sense, then, that Sin Bandera scored their first real hit, the romantic “Entra En Mi Vida,” not through traditional radio airplay but through a sync in a Mexican telenovela, Cuando Seas Mía. (“It was a remake of a Colombian soap opera about a coffee plantation. They did it around the coffee beans,” Schajris quips.) But something larger — a real movement and culture-shift in Latin music — was going on at that time.

“I remember examples of people starting to do [R&B-crossover music] in Spanish, like with Christina Aguilera with Luis Fonsi. They had this beautiful ballad ["Si No Te Hubiera Conocido"] together in 2000, and that was very influential and very important for us. They kind of set the way of where to go; we said, ‘There’s a path,’” says Garcia. “It was a group of artists — for example, Luis Fonsi coming from Puerto Rico, David Bisbal from Spain, and us from Mexico and Argentina. There was a Brazilian guy, Alexander Pires. It was moment where a group of [Latin] people were singing R&B-ish stuff, a little more contemporary. It was very exciting. … And I think what we did gave a lot of courage to people that had thought it was impossible.”

“That’s probably one of the biggest moments in our lives,” Schajris says proudly. “We kind of opened a new door.”

Twenty-five years later, Sin Bandera are still confounding expectations in a post-radio digital age; Garcia says Spotify and other streaming services usually categorize them incorrectly because they’ve “always been misunderstood,” and Noel says, “I think not even the algorithm gets us. We confuse even the algorithm!” But in a streaming era when young genre-fluid music fans listen to a bit of everything, this is working in Sin Bandera’s favor — with people of all ages, including many Gen Z concertgoers who learned about the duo from their parents, coming to their shows.

“I think there’s a strong point in our music that we’re better live than in the recordings,” notes Garcia. “That’s a characteristic of R&B and jazz — that you never repeat the same show two times.”

“We love Brazilian music. We love bossa nova. These genres are improvising a lot, always changing melody, making it differently,” Schajris elaborates. “Music happens in the moment. I think that’s life too. And music is life; its vibration is right now. So, when you buy a ticket, you’re paying for a ‘right now’ moment. … Sometimes we are even surprised ourselves! We look at each other [onstage] and it’s like, ‘Whoa, man. That was awesome.’”

The world is finally catching up with Garcia and Schajris, who are in their fifties now, and the partnership they forged long ago over a shared love of R&B and jazz is still going strong — ever after a breakup in 2007, followed by an eight-year hiatus during which they resumed their respective solo careers. They seem to appreciate what they’ve built together more than ever with the release of Escenas and the kickoff of their potentially population-boosting tour, with hopefully another 25 years of creativity ahead of them.

“I think we still have a lot of affinities, and we can talk about those, and we can talk about time and death and the end of the story and what we can do,” Garcia muses, looking back on how Sin Bandera’s music has evolved. “We’re still here, and stuff that was not there in the beginning of our careers appears later when you have a kid, when you have a wife, when you have responsibilities, and you start getting older and all this. The horizon starts to come closer, and you start to write different when you have less distance [between] the end and the beginning.”

“It’s probably because of that that we’re still so passionate,” adds Schajris. “Because it’s not forever.”

“It’s not forever. And we love that experience inside of our music,” Garcia continues. “We are trying, and I think we’re succeeding, to not to see age as a negative. We learned from artists that we really admire that are 60, 70 and they’re touring, and they’re amazing live — because they are older, they are even better. We’re trying to follow that path, staying away from the idea that youth is a necessity to be an exciting artist.”