Willy Rodriguez: Give the Drummer Some Love!

News, From the Magazine, Willy Rodriguez

By Ken Micallef I Jun. 11, 2024

“I had to lock myself in a room, grab the 5B sticks and punish my body every day,” Rodriguez said of preparing to record with the band Mars Volta.
(Photo: Leslie Farinacci)

Puerto Rican-born drummer/composer Willy Rodriguez now calls New York City his home, but he isn’t afraid to push boundaries. He’s like a sonic astronaut, comfortable jamming on genres that are as far apart as Mars’ fiery plains are from the Moon’s cool, cratered landscape.

Rodriguez’s debut album, Seeing Sounds, sees the 41-year-old Latin Grammy winner investigating post-hard-bop, Afro-Cuban traditionalism, avant-garde and drum solo terrain, a not-unusual menu for a thinking jazz musician’s debut as a leader. But when Rodriguez trades his thinner 7A sticks for a heavier 5B model, his Dr. Jekyll transforms into Mr. Hyde.

After graduating from New England Conservatory with his master’s, Rodriguez made his mark on recordings by Dave Liebman, Mon Laferte and Domino Saints; he has gigged extensively with Jason Palmer, John Ellis, Melissa Aldana and with his salsa group The 427 Flavah Factory, an ensemble that frequently lit up Wally’s Jazz Café in Boston. But it’s with progressive doom-rock band The Mars Volta where Rodriguez’s alter-ego — as a seemingly multilimbed, double-brained, odd-meter-devouring Hercules — surfaced.

On Mars Volta’s 2022 release, Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon, Rodriguez drums with fire and intensity, injecting hard-shelled traditional rhythms into Mars’ manic arrangements and complex metric challenges.

“It’s literally like being a boxer,” Rodriguez said from his home in New York. “I had to lock myself in a room, grab the 5B sticks and punish my body every day. I had to condition myself. It’s two different worlds, man. It’s messed up because I had to stop playing jazz for months and just practice that hardcore, loud music. I had to get physical, sweaty, with strong headphones, practicing loud the whole time because it’s all about building stamina.”

Flipping to the jazz side, joined by trumpeter Jason Palmer, saxophonist Hery Paz, pianist Leo Genovese, bassists John Hébert and Kenneth Jimenez and special guest artist Dave Liebman on saxophone, Rodriguez’s Seeing Sounds is equally demanding, if less physically abusive.

The album begins in a spiritual mood with “Beyond The Struggle,” inspired by John Coltrane’s “Psalm.” “It’s about how we learn from our failures, that feeling of coming out of something messed up but growing out of it,” Rodriguez reflected. “The way I was trying to do something, of course, influenced by Coltrane, but sometimes when you put musicians in an uncomfortable zone, that’s when their real soul comes out. That’s the sound I was looking for, to show the heart of the musicians instead of their muscle memory or their skills. I was thinking of how you learn from failure and how you acknowledge it.”
“Roy’s Masterplan” honors eternal jazz drumming godfather Roy Haynes, spreading Rodriguez’s percolating pocket under Palmer and Paz’s sultry improvisations as the rhythm section darts and dives around the front line.

“I needed their spontaneous, magical, mystical, mysterious exploratory vibe,” Rodriguez said. “For ‘Roy’s Masterplan’ I produced a line of numbers, let the musicians choose their key, then we played to that series of numbers, combinations of odd meters.”

Rodriguez trades dissonant ideas with Liebman on “Guani”; traverses Art Blakey-styled bop into more impressionistic terrain on “Fixed Goal”; and offers an homage to his instructors, Ralph Peterson Jr. and Bob Gullotti, on “Praise.”

On the drum solo vehicle “Self Love,” Rodriguez combines washy crash cymbals, pointillist full-set punctuations and Roy Haynes-like snare drum accents amid a minimalist, recurring theme. “That’s a funny thing here in New York,” Rodriguez said. “At gigs, everyone solos for 40 hours, yet they never let the drummers do a solo. We say, ‘Where’s the love to the drummer?’ I called it ‘Self Love,’ because no one cares. I just love myself. If you go to Smalls, everyone plays long solos. No one thinks about the drummer.”

“The Red-Tailed Hawk Is Going To Eat Your Babies” combines field recordings by producer Tehn Vega with Rodriguez’s approximation of his noisy backyard in Puerto Rico. Amid bird calls, rustling trees and ambient city sounds, Rodriguez, Hébert and Paz quake, propel and jab, the sum effect like a band of whirling dervishes flying among the trees.

“I grew up in Puerto Rico, in my ‘jungley’ backyard, where we had mango trees and the birds were always there, eating and singing loudly. And I was practicing drums. One day a hawk was eating someone’s mess or something, and the noise was crazy. I’ve always had a funny idea that I was going to have something wacky on the record. I got my friend Tehn Vega, amazing producer and sound engineer, to record different birds from my town. And I improvised with the guys, and we put it all together, man. It worked out beautifully.”

Equally compelling, the album’s eerie cover art depicts black tar dripping over a ballet dancer’s legs, with one foot held aloft — and a black horn growing from its ankle.

“In Puerto Rico, they still have cock fights or rooster fights,” Rodriguez recalled. “I was working with a Cuban painter who lives in P.R., he has a raw perspective on the culture, and the African thing in the Caribbean. This painting reflects Cuban folklore, and Yoruba dancers with spikes like roosters. I fell in love with it, because we had ‘The Red-Tailed Hawk Is Going To Eat Your Babies,’ and the relationship between birds and dancers. The dancers don’t literally have rooster’s horns on their feet. I wanted to get something to show sounds visually without showing instruments. I thought it was the perfect creative license.” DB