Jimmy Kimmel breaks down in tears paying tribute to best friend, bandleader Cleto Escobedo: Its just not fair

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 start...