Tune in on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on 90.1 FM, and streaming at wrti.org, for a new edition of The Late Set Radio Hour, featuring pianist, drummer, and bandleader Julius Rodriguez.
Rodriguez doesn't think in genres, or even in a single instrument. Raised in a Haitian-American household in White Plains, New York, he started classical piano at age three, absorbed jazz from his father's record collection, and learned to lead a congregation through gospel in church — three vocabularies that fused into one continuous musical language. By his early 20s he was a first-call sideman for artists like Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, and Kurt Elling (and even toured with A$AP Rocky) before signing to Verve and stepping out as a bandleader in his own right.
This episode traces that arc through Rodriguez's two albums as a leader — his 2022 debut Let Sound Tell All and 2024's Evergreen — and brings listeners inside a WRTI-exclusive live taping at Notsolatin, an intimate South Philly house-concert series where Rodriguez kicked off his first headlining tour in June 2023. Longtime collaborator, trumpeter Alonzo Demetrius, joins to talk about their decade-plus musical friendship, and Rodriguez shares the story behind "Funmi's Groove," a tribute to beloved New York scene fixture Michael "Funmi" Ononaiye. The hour closes with a genre-bending, house-inflected reworking of Herbie Hancock's "Butterfly," recorded live at Notsolatin.
Setlist:
- "Run to It (The CP Song)" (Rodriguez) from the album Evergreen
- "All I Do" (Stevie Wonder) from the album Let Sound Tell All
- "Rise and Shine" (Rodriguez) from the album Evergreen
- "Gift of the Moon" (Rodriguez) — recorded live at Notsolatin
- "Two Way Street" (Rodriguez) — recorded live at Notsolatin
- "Funmi's Groove" (Rodriguez) — recorded live at Notsolatin
- "Butterfly" (Herbie Hancock) — recorded live at Notsolatin
Production Credits:
Alex Ariff, Producer
Nicole Sweeney, Host
Robby Webb, Mixing Engineer
Nate Chinen and Greg Bryant, Interviewers
Jacob Dodd, Production Assistant
Special thanks to Sam Harris, Josh Lee, Patricio Acevedo, Jake Kelberman, Jake Segal, Francys Fuentes, Erin Busch, Charlie Kramer, Alonzo Demetrius, and Latrice Torres.
