“Bravo! Completely enchanting, delightful—different for my ears. It pulled me in.”
Percussion master, Ray Barretto (from JazzTimes "Before and After Interview")

DRUMMER/ARRANGER/COMPOSER ROBERTO JUAN RODRIGUEZ & SEPTETO RODRIGUEZ FORGE DISTINCTIVE JEWISH-CUBAN-GYPSY HYBRID ON NEW TZADIK CD “BAILA! GITANO BAILA!”

“Cuban Jazz meets klezmer for one hell of a party.”
Steve Greenlee, Boston Globe

“ {Rodriguez’s is] … a mesmerizing meld of pre-salsa Cuban music and traditional Jewish melodies.”
Richard Harrington, Washington Post

“This music swings, sweeps, swirls, weeps, moans, and laughs until the tears fall. The secret is in neither Latin nor Jewish music but rather in the groove; he gets it from the ground and screws it down, down,
down into the bloodstream of the astonished listener.”
Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

Tzadik Records proudly releases Baila! Gitano Baila! (Dance! Gypsy Dance!), a hugely entertaining new album by drummer-arranger-composer Roberto Juan Rodriguez and Septeto Rodriguez. The second recording from the Cuban-born New Yorker finds him in the fast company of Septeto members Matt Darriau (clarinet, flute, etc.), Curtis Hasselbring (trombone), Ted Reichman (accordion, organ), Meg Okura (violin), Sam Bardfeld (violin), Mary Wooten (cello), and Brad Jones (bass). Roberto’s father, Roberto Luis Rodriguez (trumpet and trombone), also lent his considerable talents to the session. With the release of Baila! the Septeto soon will be touring Turkey and Europe. Forays around the States are launched from their favorite New York club, Tonic.

Roberto Juan Rodriguez is a bona fide innovator, that rare musician whose creative vision synthesizes Cuban music and Jewish music into an entirely new music that breathes joy and melancholy with tremendous emotional clarity. Rodriguez speaks of his inspiration and artistic intent: “I envision this band being in Cuba in the 1930s and ‘40s. It’s like a dream band I dreamt up and put together in New York City. It’s an imaginative world that I put together to do music. It came to me because of different aspects of my life: I had a beautiful childhood [in Cuba] but there was this fear because I didn’t know what was going on [due to Castro’s repressive communist state]. I escaped that. Then I would think of Jewish culture and what happened there and my mind was moving and trying to put in this band a [quality] where you could dance and forget [the bad]. There’s always the tear factor in the music, but you can lose yourself. It’s a relief when you dance and let yourself go, when everything’s okay.”

Before leaving Cuba for Miami with his family at age 9, joining millions of others in flight, Rodriguez studied violin, piano, and trumpet at music schools in Havana, while also learning to play drums and trumpet under the approving eye of his musician father. At this time, he encountered Jewish Holocaust survivors who had re-settled in Miami, many from Eastern Europe and Cuban Jews from the island. Barely in his teens, Rodriguez started drumming professionally in his father’s ensembles in Miami. For the next decade or so, he immersed himself in the culture of Miami’s large Jewish population—exiles of the diaspora—drumming at a small Yiddish theatre company and bar mitzvas. Rodriguez, who majored in jazz and studio music at the University of Miami, took keen notice of how Jewish immigrants were fascinated with the guijara, danzon and related types of Cuban music brought to south Florida by his father and others in his wandering tribe. He learned that a number of leading Latin pianists and trumpeters of the ‘60s and ‘70s had been Jewish. Rodriquez’s bond with those of the Jewish faith was solidified.

Moving to jazz headquarters, New York, Rodriguez soon established himself as a first-call drummer. Jazz and pop notables with whom he has worked include: Ruben Blades, Lester Bowie, T-Bone Burnett, Randy Brecker, Paquito D’Rivera, Julio Iglesias, the Miami Sound Machine, Joe Jackson, Dave Liebman, Paul Simon, Lloyd Cole and Phoebe Snow. His deep interest in Jewish music was sparked by an ongoing klezmer renaissance that started in the mid-’80 and by composer-alto saxophonist John Zorn’s series of Radical Jewish Culture recordings on the Tzadik label, and, thirdly, by playing drums in Jewish guitarist Marc Ribot’s Los Cubanos Postizos band.

When Zorn asked if he would like to record an album of Jewish music for Tzadik, Rodriguez jumped at the opportunity. Drawing on his experiences in Miami and NYC bands, he began composing for the first time in his life. Soon enough, he enlisted the help of musicians like clarinetist David Krakauer and entered the recording studio. El Danzon de Moises (The Dance of Moses)—overflowing with fresh, remarkable Judeo-Cuban music — appeared in 2002 to critical raves from DownBeat, the Village Voice and many other publications. The formation of Septeto Rodriguez and a new album followed.

The Songs
Rodriguez hopes the cross-pollinating dance music heard on Baila! Gitano Baila! helps to make the world a smaller, happier place. “That’s been my goal from the beginning of the project, to reach people and have them come together through music.” Far more dance-oriented than the previous album, the ten tracks on Baila! go beyond the Havana-Miami-New York axis, drawing on Jewish or Latin music from South America, northwest Africa, and southwest Europe. Every single one of his wonderfully vibrant compositions, not unexpectedly, is deeply personal and rooted in his being. Rodriguez shines as composer, arranger, and drummer.

Rodriguez offers insight into the multi-cultural tracks: “Wolfe’s Corner,” which mixes a soupcon of tear (sadness) with intoxicating joy, points to a fond boyhood memory. “Wolfe’s was a restaurant in Miami I went to every Sunday with my grandfather. And he’d take me to the beach to see old Jews dance the mambo and cha-cha.” “Paseo Del Prado” a danzon that suggests a promenade in Cuba that resembles New York’s Eastern Parkway, connecting his “thoughts from here and there, here as an adult and there as a child.” He says “Hadida” is “a piece I wrote for the first Moroccan Sephardic Jew who came to Cuba, coming to a whole different culture, a whole new place.” Rodriguez adds,“Curtis Hasslbring brings out the soul from a dark place [with] an ugly but beautiful sound and Matt Darriau connects the cultures of clarinet in Jewish music.”

Rodriguez speaks of the title song “Baila! Gitano Baila!”: “It has different sections, a salsa side to it, a guaguanco. It shows a different aspect of Cuba through the label Radical Jewish Culture project. I am breaking with tradition, with form and style, but the influences are all there. It offers them in a different flavor and these musicians bring their own outlook. “Piruli,” named for a Cuban lollipop that was sold along with peanuts and other treats on street corners by Polish Jews in Havana, is “very Felliniesque, Nino Rota-like with a Cuban exotica aspect to it and it has a tear.” He says “Para Peru” is his “tribute to Peru, the disapora, wandering Jews.” Moreover, it’s a warm, delighted thank-you. “Peru took in a lot of Cubans after they defected to the Peruvian embassy in Havana and there are still a lot of Cubans there. I think it was a beautiful gesture from that country.”

The song “Marranos y Conversos” is “about the Marrano Jews and the Conversos who converted to Christianity [in the infamous Inquisition in the late 15th century], otherwise they were going to get executed. The music has the cross-pollination between the music of Latin American and Caribbean with Sephardic [elements]. You hear the melody on cello and it grows and that captures that culture that’s there.” “Dice El Sabio Solomon,” translating as Solomon The Wise, is what Rodriguez calls “a good dance tune.” A salsaesque-cumbia with Cuban and Colombian roots. He says “Sosua La Bella” was inspired “by a little town in the Dominican Republic with a small community of Jews that came there and still live there. It’s my interpretation of a smooth Dominican ballad. It has a nice rhythm to it and it’s close to a cross between a bolero and a cha cha. It has a dance flavor.” The rousing “Turkish-Bulgarish” is his homage to 20th century klezmer great Naftule Brandwein. “He was on the Lower East Side and I took him to Havana,” Rodriguez says with a grin.