Rodriguez Sits In as Role Model to Young Musicians

Next to his music, trumpeter-bandleader Bobby Rodriguez likes best to talk about the role models he had growing up in East L.A. and later as a fledgling musician.

Rodriguez, who will lead the 23-piece Hispanic Musicians Assn. Orchestra at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Theatre on Sunday in music from his dance score “Salsa Ballet,” has told hundreds of students how he made something of himself through discipline and determination. In doing so, he has become something of a role model himself.

Rodriguez was a 10-year-old trumpet student at Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School when he first came under the tutelage of the late music instructor Bill Taggart. Their relationship continued during his days at Bishop Mora Salesian High School.

“[Taggart] always told us we could do anything we wanted as long as we got an education,” says the 46-year-old Rodriguez. “When I go out to the schools now to work with the kids, I make the connection with what he told me, and I tell them the same thing.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in music at Cal State Long Beach, Rodriguez went on to work with others who served as models, including Quincy Jones (“I want to be Quincy Jones,” Rodriguez says), Lalo Schifrin and Ray Charles.

Rodriguez was on hand in 1986 when pianist Eddie Cano organized the Hispanic Musicians Assn. “We started getting together just as a social function, maybe 10 or 12 different musicians, talking about our common experiences as Latino musicians. Soon we were having meetings once a month with 50 to 100 people.”

Rodriguez became president of the organization in 1989, the same year the association formed an orchestra. He wrote “Salsa Ballet” over a period of five years with veteran trumpet player Paul Lopez.

“Paul’s our salsa guru, our teacher,” Rodriguez says. “He was there in New York the night Dizzy [Gillespie] first came out to hear [Cuban percussionist] Chano Pozo.” (The full ballet, with dance troupe, is tentatively set to premiere at the Luckman in 1998.)

Rodriguez issued his first album, “Plays Duke Ellington,” last year on his own Latin Jazz Productions label. He stays busy as the director of jazz studies at the Los Angeles High School of the Arts on the Cal State L.A. campus.

He also teaches at the Los Angeles Music & Arts School in East L.A. and makes appearances at campuses around town as a member of the Jazz America program and Buddy Collette’s Brotherhood-Sisterhood Big Band. In addition, he’s the West Coast trumpet coach for the Thelonious Monk Institute.

“All these children I work with are just like me when I was growing up,” he says, “wanting to improve myself but not knowing how. Now, when I see that sparkle in a kid’s eye when he realizes something for the first time, it’s wonderful, I can identify with it. I used to be that kid.”

* Bobby Rodriguez and the HMA Orchestra appear Sunday at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, 4 p.m. $30, $25, seniors and students $12. (213) 343-6600.

Barretto’s Back: Conguero-band leader Ray Barretto, who appears tonight and Saturday at the Ash Grove, can’t remember the last time he played Los Angeles.

“It’s been 20 years easy,” he says in a phone conversation from his New York home. “I had a crossover hit in the ‘60s, ‘El Watusi,’ that was big on the coast and I used to come out often. But that was another time and another place for me.”

Things have changed mightily since the 67-year-old Barretto’s crossover days. The percussionist who came out of Brooklyn to work with such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Red Garland, Lou Donaldson, Gene Ammons and Freddie Hubbard as well as leading his own, groundbreaking Afro Cuban ensembles, has moved away from dance music in the last several years to a more involved blend of jazz and Latin rhythms with his ensemble New World Spirit.

“We respect the genre of jazz more than most Latin jazz bands,” Barretto says. “A lot of the groups now just play bebop heads with traditional Latin rhythm section. I think that formula is stupefying.”

Rhythmically surprising, improvisationally rich arrangements of “Autumn Leaves,” “When You Wish Upon a Star” and Thelonious Monk’s “Off Minor” heard on Barretto’s last album, “My Summertime” (Owl/Blue Note), show what he means.

“It’s taken me six or seven years to build an audience for this music, and it’s still relatively small compared to my dance band days,” he says. “The early years of New World Spirit were pretty tough. People were always yelling for us to play salsa and dance music. But now, something we believe in is starting to take root.”

Barretto will be interviewed by Guido Herrera on the radio program “Alma Del Barrio” on KXLU-FM (88.9) Saturday at 2 p.m.

* Ray Barretto and New World Spirit play the Ash Grove, 250 Santa Monica Pier, tonight and Saturday, 8:30 and 11 p.m. $20. (310) 656-8500.

Free Latin Jazz: Percussionist Bobby Matos, who’s heard covering Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Lalo Schifrin and others in fine style on his recent Cubop/Ubiquity release “Footprints,” leads his Afro Cuban Jazz Ensemble at Santa Monica College Concert Hall, 1990 Pico Blvd., Thursday at 11 a.m. (310) 452-9323.