“It is not what you think of when you hear the word ‘jazz’,” says Julius Rodriguez, when asked about the title of his new sophomore album, “Evergreen”. “But this project has all the elements I’ve always been true to in my music. You just have to be open and listen.”
New York City born-and-raised, Los Angeles-based Rodriguez has carved a new sound from a confluence of factors: skills as a producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist – particularly, piano and drums. Influences that range from John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk to Burna Boy and Pink Pantheress. There’s his fertile imagination, knack for improvisation and determination to bust boundaries and serve what he simply calls “the music.”
Aged just 25, with hundreds of gigs under his belt and a shining reputation as a forward-thinking sideman – to which the likes Wynton Marsalis and Meshell Ndegeocello will attest – Rodriguez won plaudits in 2022 with “Let Sound Tell All”, a debut deemed “so dynamic that even the umbrella of jazz couldn’t quite contain its essence” by NPR, and a showcase that let him set out his stall, declare his intent.
“My authentic voice comes out regardless of the situation, genre or style,” says Rodriguez, the son of Haitian immigrants whose immersion in the local musically inclined Baptist church, and in a vast range of jazz and soul music, set him on his career path. “You think of people like Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Tyler the Creator, Solange… they are the ones who break out of their so-called ‘genre’ and into the audiences around it and become cultural voices. So even if you aren’t the biggest R&B head you still know Stevie Wonder. Even if you aren’t a jazz head you still know ‘Take the A-Train’. This is what I aspire to.”
By way of dazzling reiteration, “Evergreen” kicks off with “Mission Statement”, a spacey Hancock-esque jaunt with Rodriguez on keys that loops and backflips around a silky bassline before swerving into chattering cymbals and a dreamy, horizon-finding saxophone solo. Like the album itself, it is as intriguing and celebratory as it is ambitious and audacious, investigating the notion of jazz as a receptable, as a sport of an absorbent musical sponge, forever renewing itself.
Rodriguez pauses as he considers this. “Jazz is a word I don’t really like to use,” says the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard School graduate, whose early musical memories involve listening to Prince’s “Musicology” and Norah Jones’s “Come Away With Me” and taking “The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin”, an early live album by the gospel icon, into school show-and-tell. “But [jazz] isn’t what it was when it was first created from European harmony and African and Afro-Latin rhythms. Times change. Things update.”
“We updated cars, technology, the way we dress, how we communicate. Why not update the sound and the way we compose? My sound it isn’t just about the influences given to me by my parents and teachers.” He credits Bay Area drummer Kenny Washington with turning him onto modern jazz icons Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones. “But also the music that is coming out today.”
Several like minds have contributed to Rodriguez’s vision, among them the Grammy-winning trumpeter Keyon Harrold, who guests on “Love Everlasting”, and the singer, experimentalist and self-described “ancestors instrument” Georgia Anne Muldrow. The latter stepped into the recording of “Champion’s Call” to unleash an impassioned flow of bars and chanted exhortations over classically informed pianism that evolves into something increasingly progressive, percussive, Monk-like.
“I’m very influenced by Monk and just bebop drummers in general,” says Rodriguez, who also goes by the alias Orange Julius, a high school nickname (and a type of smoothie drink). “As a drummer myself, I approach the piano differently. I’m always like, ‘Okay, there are all these notes you can do, but what about the rhythm? What about the way it can make you feel?'”
Having sat in on his first jam aged 11, the energy of a live crowd has long been both motivator and litmus test. Rodriguez’s 2020 cover of Herbie Hancock’s smash hit “Butterfly” was developed over the course of airings in many different venues. He’d enjoyed this symbiotic musician-audience vibe when a member of experimental jazz art ensemble Onyx Collective, whose collaborators included members of the Wu Tang Clan; in 2018, they supported a tour by American rapper A$AP Rocky, for whom Rodriguez also played keyboards and guitar.
“I’d known some of these musicians since I was 12 or 13,” says Rodriguez, who plays everything from piano, Hammond B-3, Fender Rhodes and synths to drums, bass, guitars and clarinet on “Evergreen” (oh, and also does some of the programming). “They created such a unique palette for themselves and came to hip-hop collaborations through being in the underground NYC scene, the skate scene and all that.”
“They were in the free jazz avant-garde scene too,” he continues. “So I had my hand in a bunch of line-ups. I’d do improvisational shows, straight ahead things, R&B things. When the call came to do A$AP Rocky, it was partly because they knew I understood different styles and what they would need.”
Rodriguez currently has two band line ups of his own – the East Coast musicians who play on “Evergreen”, among them drummer Like Titus and Phillip Norris on upright bass, and a West Coast outfit that includes rising star bassist Jermaine Paul. “Every musician I choose has a unique voice, so if one person has to swap out then I’ll rethink the whole set list. I want to play to people’s strengths. Miles Davis’s sound would change when his band switched up; it’s the same for me. We have the written songs but I always try and have them be free breathing, living, evolving compositions. That way they stay fresh. They stay…”
Evergreen?
“Yeah,” he smiles. “Evergreen.”
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Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.
Header Image: Julius Rodriguez. Photo courtesy of Verve Records.