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Jaime Rosas — Tres Piezas de Rock Progresivo
(Mylodon MRM142, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2026-02-22

Tres Piezas de Rock Progresivo Cover art

Many years ago, shortly after the turn of the last century, the annual Baja Prog festival featured an exceptionally powerful Chilean band called Entrance, who among many exceptional musicians sported a hot-shot keyboardist of the Emerson or Wakeman variety who left a lasting impression on the audience. I went home with a couple of their CDs, the reviews appeared in our printed edition, issue #27, and a few years later managed to get one more CD, recorded live at that Baja Prog where I saw them first; how cool is that? That keyboardist’s name was Jaime Rojas, and sometime around 2010 Entrance split up and Rojas went solo, Tres Piezas de Rock Progresivo being his third album recorded since. That title translates roughly to Three Pieces of Progressive Rock, and the title surely fits, though there are five tracks on the album — three epic length pieces of about ten minutes each are what the title refers to, bookended by two shorter pieces as an intro and outro; all are instrumental endeavors, meaning no singing or lyrics, though one of the long pieces has some field recordings with spoken elements amid electronic sounds, vocoder manipulation and such. Rojas’ band is a trio: drummer Fernando Jaramillo and bassist Braulio Aspé provide the powerful rhythm section that rocks the sound over which Rojas layers all manner of keyboards — piano, crunchy Hammond organ, analog synths, and more, pretty much dominating all the melodic aspects of the sound, as well as the emotional ups and downs, frantic changes in tempo, classic instrumental power trio fare. The three-minute “Cueca Contemporánea” opens the set, building up to the first epic, “Contrarobot” — this is the one with the electronics and field recordings in the background, but that said, it’s still a pretty formidable piece, building up to the even-more edgy and rocking “Reflexiones,” followed by “La Cueva del Mylodon” (“The Mylodon’s Cave,” mylodon being an extinct type of giant ground sloth that was native to South America), a powerful piece with a lot of stops and starts and sharp contrasts as it proceeds. For the five-minute “Jazz Prog Mambo” closing track, the band starts out in a very piano jazz idiom, slowly working their way up in intensity to what could best be described as smokin’ 70s style jazz-rock fusion. Tres Piezas de Rock Progressivo bristles with energy from beginning to end.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Jaime Rosas

More info
http://mylodonrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tres-piezas-de-rock-progresivo

 

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