Jesus Molina, in love with jazz

The person responsible for Jesús Molina choosing music as his life project was his grandmother. She gave the artist a small piano when he was just 4 years old.

Then, when his parents noticed that the boy had a great talent for music, they took him to study at a church, where he learned gospel music. Then, when he was 15, he found the “love” of his life.

“That was when I fell madly in love with jazz,” said the artist, who was in his native Colombia on vacation the day of the interview. “I found 10,000 videos on YouTube and that’s when I started studying because it challenged me, and because it challenged me, I fell in love with that music.”

The big change in her life came when she received a scholarship from the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation to study music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She left her hometown of Sincelejo in the Colombian Caribbean in 2016 —when she was barely 19 years old— and went to a country whose language she didn’t even know.

Now, with the many relationships that his time at Berklee left him, Jesús recorded “Selah,” which means “praise” or “to elevate.” It is a ten-track instrumental album in which jazz personalities such as bassist Guy Bernfeld and drummer Cain Daniel collaborated.

Hubert Laws is featured on the flute, while Sin Bandera member Noel Schajris contributes a cappella vocals to the dreamy and hopeful “Soul Journey”; the violin is played by Lucia Micarelli.

“The album is a love letter to music,” said the artist. “These songs have been the result of several years of compiling melodies, arrangements, and above all, new songs that came to me.”

What Jesus loves about jazz is the freedom that its performers have to create. It’s like learning another language, except that in jazz you never stop learning it, the artist said.

“For the language of jazz, you have to listen to a lot of music, immerse yourself in it because it’s not easy,” he said. “I fell in love with the language, the culture and the lifestyle, because that’s what it is, because jazz stands firm in freedom, creating all the time, so that nothing sounds the same; it’s bringing creativity out.”