- Tjader's parents settled in San Mateo, California, and opened a dance studio. His mother (who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist) instructed him in classical piano and his father taught him to tap dance.
- Carl Jefferson, president of Concord Records, created a subsidiary label called Concord Picante to promote and distribute Tjader's work.
- Tjader teamed up with New Yorker Eddie Palmieri in 1966 to produce El Sonido Nuevo ("The New Sound"). A companion LP was recorded for Palmieri's contract label, Tico, titled Bamboleate. While Tjader's prior work was often dismissed as "Latin lounge", here the duo created a darker, more sinister sound. Cal Tjader Plays The Contemporary Music Of Mexico And Brazil (1962), released during the bossa nova craze, actually bucked the trend, instead using more traditional arrangements from the two countries' past.
- His father tap danced and his mother played piano, a husband-wife team going from city to city with their troupe to earn a living.
- He performed a brief non-speaking role dancing alongside Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the film The White of the Dark Cloud of Joy.
- At age sixteen, he entered a Gene Krupa drum solo contest, making it to the finals and ultimately winning by playing "Drum Boogie". The win was overshadowed by that morning's event: Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor.[.
- He was known for his talents on the vibraphone, but also accomplished on drums and bongos.
- Tjader entered the United States Navy in 1943 at age 17 and served as a medical corpsman in the Pacific Theater until March 1946. He saw action in five invasions, including the Marianas campaign and the Battle of the Philippines.
- The American hip-hop band A Tribe Called Quest sampled songs from Cal's "Aquarius" (from The Prophet) as an outro to most of the songs on their album Midnight Marauders.
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