Julius Rodriguez

Is it fair to call Julius Rodriguez and the community of young artists he works with jazz's new vanguard? Born in 1998, the musician does not bristle at that four-letter word the way many of his colleagues who practice great Black American Music do. Having studied jazz since childhood, attending its prominent youth programs and learning institutions while developing a playing dexterity and a composer's ear for its blues-, spirituals-, and ballad-related cornerstones, Julius recognizes jazz's cultural value and the processes that further its prestige as America's classical music.

He has worked as a sideman with Keyon Harrold, Ben Williams, Carmen Lundy, James Morrison, Jazzmeia Horn, Dev Hynes, Roy Hargrove, Macy Gray, Wynton Marsalis, Veronica Swift, Gabriel Garzón-Montano, Kurt Elling, Nick Hakim, Meshell Ndegeocello and others.

What becomes abundantly apparent from listening to Let Sound Tell All, Rodriguez's debut album as leader, is that, schooled though he may be in jazz's conventions, Julius doesn't believe in the limitations by which jazz's guardians have come to define it.

When you hear Julius Rodriguez play "the music," as he calls it, it's a modern Sound, as fluent in history as it is aware of its contemporary context. His music dares to imagine a future of new standards and sonic excitement. This vanguard was raised in an atmosphere where pop and hip-hop and dance influenced their approaches to melody and harmony and rhythm, so of course it is part of their improvisational DNA. And that's what Julius Rodriguez's Sound tells to whoever will choose to listen.

Thinking about his music's progress, Rodriguez remembers "a perfect backhanded compliment" from drummer Terri Lynne Carrington during a five-week stint at Berklee's summer program, that proved crucial: "She said, 'When we played that last tune, for a minute there, it sounded like Art Blakey came down from heaven.' But then she added, 'That's not all there is — you can't get tied up in the tradition.' It made me consider what I was focusing on, and what I was maybe leaving out. That's the moment I think about to this day: you can't get tied up in tradition, you gotta expand."

"My music is improvisation based…but it's influenced by a lot of other things too," Julius says when asked that, if not jazz, what should we call his sound. "At one point I was calling it 'jazz pop songs' - it's simpler melodies, shorter songs, shorter arrangements, but we were still soloing and playing jazz language over it.

It's just music that I write, influenced by all the things going on around me. Contemporary instrumental music. But it's funny when you say something like that, people assume you're gonna play some weird out/neoclassical [stuff]. No, you can improvise some simple things that people can sing back and dance through too. That's what I wanna do. I feel like that's one of the reasons why we don't have a lot of instrumentalists in pop culture and at the forefront, because people just aren't doing it."

Awards

GRAMMY Award