Being described as a ‘rising jazz phenom’ and your music as a cosmic jazz saga’ has to have more than a solid basis to deserve such lofty praise.
That is precisely the praise Julius Rodriguez got for his most recent album ‘Let Sound Tell All,’ which now comes with a deluxe edition (three additional tracks to the original version of the album).
So where do the reasons for such praise lie in Rodriguez’s music? First of all, it is in the fact that with such a number of sub-genres jazz has, Rodriguez, seems to have an absolute command of quite a few of those, along with others that do not necessarily fall within jazz itself – from gospel to ‘standard’ and fusion jazz to classical music as well as R&B and hip-hop.
Yet, it is not just that he plays any or all of them alongside each other, it is that he often combines them within a single composition, which he does with both ease and grace, something that can only be done by somebody who has complete mastery of all those musical concepts.
And whatever he touches here, from the classically tinged opener “Dora’s Lullaby” to the fusion-fueled “Chemical X” or the ‘standard’ jazz of “Blues At The Barn,” Rodriguez does it brilliantly.
