“He is very special,” Quincy Jones has said of the 26-year-old Cuban pianist-composer Alfredo Rodríguez. It's pretty good to be able to get that kind of endorsement from old Quincy, it's even better if you can also get him to co-produce your first record. Which is precisely what has happened in Rodríguez's case. Having been invited to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival six years ago, Rodríguez was given the opportunity to demonstrate his chops personally to Jones, who was so impressed he immediately offered his assistance. It's taken a while since then to get this disc made and into the public domain, but it's been worth the wait.

Rodríguez claims musical descent from the likes of Ernesto Lecuona (the Cuban George Gershwin, it has been said) and Thelonious Monk. Rodríguez's accompanists are all top-drawer – PhDs could be written on the percussive felicities of the arrangements – but this disc is really a showcase for the leader's two fine hands. There's a wonderful fl uency about his playing – those liquid lines seem to just fl ow from his fingers – but Monk's unorthodox spirit imprints the outro of ‘Oxygen’. The title track has a similarly snaky angularity while ‘Crossing the Border’ has an engagingly angst-y drive and the graceful ‘Cu-Bop’, which finds forward momentum in its own stop-start intricacies, tells you everything you need to know about the principal well this promising young player is drawing from.