“Young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez sounds the way Monk might have sounded if he had been born in Chick Corea’s body and raised on a diet of Bach, Chopin and Stravinsky in a Havana conservatory.” - San Jose Mercury News  

Alfredo Rodriguez©Andrea Canter

One of the reasons I love the Detroit Jazz Festival is the opportunity to hear jazz giants in the making alongside the established titans. In Detroit I first heard young monster pianist Gerald Clayton, drummer Francisco Mela, and (as a professional), vocalist José James. The surprise delight of my 2009 Detroit experience was a young expatriate Cuban pianist, Alfredo Rodriguez.

Unlike any Cuban pianist I have heard, the then-23-year-old Rodriguez seemed more a melding of Bill Evans, Kenny Werner, and Fred Hersch. He flashed touches of Thelonious Monk in conception if not execution, as well as hints here and there of his Cuban heritage... if Chopin had spent time in Havana. In a bold solo set, his rendition of “Body and Soul” was the most stirring keyboard version I can remember, and he arranged the unlikely nursery rhyme, “Frère Jacques,” as if always intended to be a beautiful jazz ballad. Now two years into his life in the U.S., displaying technical brilliance tempered by touch and eloquent voicings, Alfredo Rodriguez and his trio will tour the West Coast, March 19-24, covering territory from San Jose to Los Angeles.

The journey from Cuba to his current home in Los Angeles was neither easy nor a straight line. In his native Havana, son of a famous Cuban singer, Alfredo showed an early interest in percussion. Enrolled at the famed Manuel Saumell Elementary Classical Music Conservatory, percussion studies were not allowed until age ten, so Alfredo switched to piano. Initially he did not seem well suited for the instrument. "In my first year it was very difficult because the teacher told me I would never be a pianist," he recently told the LA Times. "Very traumatic!" The only formal music education available was classical, but by his early teens, Alfredo was developing an interest in popular music and began playing with small ensembles on the streets of Havana. Soon he joined his father’s band and toured throughout Cuba, then Latin America and Spain. An uncle introduced him to the music of Keith Jarrett via The Koln Concert. “It was brilliant," Rodriguez said, “Because Keith Jarrett, of course, is a great connoisseur of classical music -- of Bach, of Mozart, of all music. In this disc it's like...a great improvisation from the roots of classical music and of jazz. This man sits at the piano and plays. This man reflects life in the piano. I said, 'That's what I want to do.' "

Alfredo continued classical studies until 2006, when he was selected as one of two Cubans to play at the Montreux Jazz Festival. There, playing his own music for the first time outside of Cuba, he came to the attention of Quincy Jones. "To me that's the future, man,” noted Jones. “Because he is an absolute monster, he composes, writes, all day long. He played so hard on that piano that day, he broke the C string." Jones maintained contact with the young pianist over the next three years while trying to find a way to cut through the morass of US-Cuba politics to work with Alfredo in the U.S.

In early 2009, Alfredo decided to defect in order to pursue his music career. “The idea began to take hold in my head of coming here, because it was the only option of working with Quincy," he said. After several earlier attempts to leave Cuba, Alfredo put his plan in motion, to defect while touring in Mexico with his father in January 2009.  But it was not great timing, as only a few months earlier, the governments of Mexico and Cuba had agreed to deport any Cubans traveling illegally to the U.S. via Mexico, and the punishment would be imprisonment in Cuba. Stopped by Mexican authorities at the U.S. border, Alfredo initially denied his effort to defect, then decided to be  honest about his desire for a new life to pursue his music. Maybe the border agent was a music lover—he put him into a cab for the U.S. border, where Alfredo sought, and was granted, asylum. Regarding his decision to leave his family and girlfriend in Cuba, he notes that “Everyone has a destiny. Mine is music. I decided to come here for better or for worse because of music and only for music. Of course I miss my family and my country, but I’m following my music, which is what I’ve done my whole life.”

Now able to work with Quincy Jones, Alfredo Rodriguez has whirled through his first two years as a U.S. resident, playing to capacity crowds at the Playboy Jazz Festival, the SXSW Music Festival, the Detroit Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, and the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Opening for Herbie Hancock and others, Alfredo played for 18,000 fans at the LA Symphony’s official welcome for Gustavo Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl. In July of 2010 Alfredo did his first European tour with his trio, playing at XVI International Open Air Festival (Poland), Jazz a Vienne Festival (France), North Sea Jazz Festival (Netherlands), Umbria Jazz Festival (Italy), Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), and with the Quincy Jones Global Gumbo All Stars (Richard Bona, Lionel Loueke, Paulinho da Costa, Francisco Mela, and Nikki Yanofsky). He’s become a major star in China after co-writing, with Quincy Jones, “Better City, Better Life,” the official theme song of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo; he has since played at the 2010 Shanghai Film Festival and the 2010 Shanghai Tourist Festival.

Alfredo’s debut CD, to be released in early 2011 on Qwest Records, will cover a world of music—Cuban standards, American jazz, maybe some Asian music as well. "My love is improvisation," he says, "but I want to do my music in every style. I'm not closed. I'm open-minded...I don't only play the piano as a melodic instrument. For me, it's a total instrument. I could do whatever I wanted with a piano. I could play drums on the piano. I like music that's very rhythmic, with a lot of contrapuntal. I'm a person who thinks that life is to be explored. And that is simply what I do with music." And certainly, his approach to the piano is a metaphor for the early life of Alfredo Rodriguez.

Joining Alfredo on his West Coast tour are bassist Ricardo Rodriguez (no relation) and drummer Henry Cole. 

Tour Dates:

March 19, 4 pm: San Jose Jazz Winter Jazz Festival, Club Regent at the Fairmont

March 22, 7:30/9 pm at the Vibrato Grill, Los Angeles

March 23, 8/10 pm at Yoshi’s, San Francisco

March 24, 7 pm, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz 

More about Alfredo Rodriguez at www.alfredomusic.com    

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