When Norwood artist Ibrahim Gonzalez met film maverick Melvin Van Peebles in the Bronx three years ago, the two offbeat characters felt a strong connection and became immediate friends.

For Gonzalez, who dabbles in several artistic media but is best known as a conga-playing Bronx bandleader, the encounter also produced a sort of mid-life artistic epiphany that he hopes will propel him to new heights in his career. Already, it’s propelled him into the Tribeca Film Festival and given him the confidence to produce his own documentary.   

“He really lit a fire under my butt,” Gonzalez says.

Gonzalez, a 52-year-old Nuyorican from East Harlem, and Van Peebles, a 76-year-old African-American Chicagoen, met through a mutual friend who works at Pacifica radio, where Gonzalez hosts a weekly music show.

Van Peebles, best known for his subversive independent films and outlandish style (“Sweet Sweetback’s Badaaaaas Song” is probably his biggest hit), was working on a new movie called “Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus Itchyfooted Mutha.”

Gonzalez, a gregarious man who is not shy when talking about his own diverse skill-set, speaks reverently about Van Peebles. “He’s a true renaissance man,” he says. These days, Van Peebles bounces from his homes in Manhattan, Los Angeles and Paris and basically picks and chooses the projects he works on, most of them his own. He writes, composes music and acts in addition to filmmaking.

Watching them hang out in Gonzalez’s apartment overlooking Williamsbridge Oval Park, Gonzalez’s wife, Janet Norquist-Gonzalez, said the two “really hit it off.” Almost instantly, she said, they started joking like old friends. Plus, “they both love cigars,” she said.

Gonzalez showed Van Peebles around the neighborhood and Van Peebles showed him a preview of his unfinished new movie. In the end, Van Peebles asked Gonzalez to do camera work and as well as some location scouting.

“He basically said, ‘this will look good for your portfolio,’” Gonzalez said. More importantly, though, as Gonzalez watched pieces of Van Peebles’ new movie, he says it gave him the confidence to explore his own vision for making motion pictures.

As an artist, Gonzalez is literally a child of two fathers. His father, an amateur photographer, taught him how to use a camera. His stepfather, a “semi-pro” musician, asked him to fill in on the congas one night and, at age 12, he held his own after more or less learning how to play on the streets of East Harlem.  

“There was always street music going on,” he says of his childhood. “I would go to sleep listening to the rhythms of the street. It was like my lullaby.”

During his 20s, Gonzalez’s music career got sidetracked as he left New York and raised a family with his first wife (he has five children and five grandchildren). But he returned to the city in his 30s determined to restart his musical career. In the mid-1990s, Gonzalez decided to become a bandleader for the first time.

Gonzalez fronts three bands, though he laments that he only plays two or three gigs a month. (He played at the Bronx Ball last Saturday.) He not only shares his musical tastes as the host of a weekly show on Pacifica radio, he also teaches music at Manhattan College.

He’s always taken photos, but only recently began showing them publicly at an exhibit at a City Island restaurant. Van Peebles says Gonzalez is “full of ideas” and that he would work with him again “in a heartbeat.”

Since their meeting three years ago, Gonzalez not only worked on Van Peebles’ film (the four showings at Tribeca were sold out and drew rave reviews, Van Peebles said), but also has completed his own full-length documentary about an “exemplary” east Bronx middle school, which he spent a year shooting and editing. That piece recently ran four times on Bronxnet, where he also works as a freelance editor.

He’s calling his latest project “Innertube,” which he describes as a kind of experimental collection of moving images and scenes. It all exists in his mind at this stage, but Gonzalez hopes it will catch on at Bronxnet and maybe beyond.  Gonzalez’s career might be served better if he chose to focus on music or movies or photography. But that’s not his style.

Choosing just one medium would be “like picking a favorite child,” he says. Norquist-Gonzalez, a Bronx middle-school teacher says, “He does a lot of different things. Maybe, it’s held him back, but that’s part of who he is.”

Still, he hopes to finally break out as an artist in his own right. For years, Gonzalez says, he’s always been “contributing to other people’s stuff. I’ve paid some dues. It’s my turn.”