“In these recordings, Tomas Rodriguez navigates an intersection of global traditions with a compositional directness that is most delightful and charming to listen to. Beautifully recorded and sensitively played. Listening to the record I felt like I was living in quieter times.” — Derek Gripper, South African guitarist, winner, Songlines Album of the Year 2025
We live in times that produce anxiety and pull people further from their truest selves. Tomas Rodriguez makes music that brings them back home.
A Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer, Rodriguez creates original works that draw from Spanish flamenco, Afro-Peruvian landó, Cuban guaguancó, and West African kora music. From these sources and others, Rodriguez crafts a deeply felt musical language that is woven together by a carefully honed compositional voice. His fourth album, Whispered Awakening (2026), is the fullest expression of that language to date, featuring eight original compositions that, as one writer expressed, “bring rhythm, lineage, silence, and personal history within a single uninterrupted sound world.”
Speaking of its beginnings, Rodriguez said: “The album was born in the silence of the 2020 lockdown. It was a silence that invited me to reflect on the past, to consider those who came before, to rekindle certain memories whose full significance may have remained undiscovered — because until then, I had been too busy to nurture them.” The circular patterns of the landó groove, the guaguancó clave, the kora’s kumbengo — became like musical messengers.”
IndieBoulevard described his playing as felt “on some cellular level, at the level of nerve endings.” Arashk Azizi wrote that in Rodriguez’s hands virtuosity “becomes a transparent medium through which memory, reflection, and atmosphere emerge with remarkable intimacy.” Plastic Magazine (UK) called the album “a stunning display of his composition talent and performance panache.”
Rodriguez’ diverse background and varied musical experiences served as a wellspring for the musical vision of Whispered Awakening. Born in Washington D.C. to a Spanish father and an American mother from the Appalachian region, he taught himself guitar by ear through Jimi Hendrix recordings, later going on to study classical guitar with Sharon Isbin at the Manhattan School of Music. He toured with New York City’s Pregones Theatre, one of the top Latino theatre companies in the US, and spent several summers immersed in the flamenco culture of Sevilla, Spain. Recent collaborations include a duo with Gambian kora master Salieu Suso — the duo’s video for the Tiny Desk Concert in 2022 remains one of the few instrumental pieces chosen as a ‘Top Shelf’ selection for the heavily singer-songwriter focused contest.
He has performed at Merkin Hall – Kaufman Music Center, Trinity Church, Brooklyn Museum, New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts (NJPAC), the International Festival of the Guitar in Lima, and the University of Virginia, among many other venues.
A dedicated educator, Rodriguez directs an honors-level guitar program for young musicians in Brooklyn rooted in African, Latin, flamenco, jazz, and classical traditions. His students have gone on to LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz for Young People program.
