The life of a professional musician can be unsettled, as you commonly need more than one band or project to sustain yourself, both creatively and financially.
This is a scenario that Miguel Jimenez-Cruz knows well.
At age 32, Jimenez-Cruz is at a crossroads. He has more than a decade of experience playing with local bands, national touring companies of Broadway shows, and national indie rock groups. At the moment, though, he’s emphasizing Rhythmia, a group of well-known Reno musicians who are just now laying the groundwork to be a popular regional band.
Even with all of these opportunities outside of Reno, Jimenez-Cruz lives here instead of a big music center like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
“I make a living playing music here,” Jimenez-Cruz said during an interview after a shift at his non-musical day job—slinging drinks at Chrome Coffee Works. “I literally have three to four gigs a week, but I always have opportunities to continue with my day job. That’s so hard to find.
“There’s also the mental health part. You have the mountains here, all this wonderful nature. And the community. This is a village. I’ve always felt like if I’m ever stuck in a rut, this place always helps me out somehow.”
Hitting the road
Originally from Puerto Rico, Jimenez-Cruz grew up in Las Vegas and moved to Reno in 2012 to pursue music classes at the University of Nevada, Reno. He said that in his third year of studies, he quit to become a professional drummer. He toured with Broadway shows and worked often in Las Vegas.
He also found time to drum for local and national groups, including Reno’s The Novelists; Florida Latin-indie musician Jason Joshua; roots-music group Satsang from Montana; and former Reno resident Tim Snider’s band Wolfgang Timber, now based in based in Wichita, Kan., with which he still performs today.
There’s a family connection regarding Jimenez-Cruz’s drive to be a gigging musician. His father, Pepe Jimenez, has decades of experience touring with groups like Santana and for traveling productions of The Lion King and Mamma Mia!
A particularly notable band Jimenez-Cruz joined for tours was Y La Bamba, the acclaimed Latin-meets-indie rock group from Oregon, who hired him in 2018. He played two sold-out shows with the band Revolution Hall in Portland.
“They told me, ‘We really like you. Can you stay?’” Jimenez-Cruz said.
His stint as the Y La Bamba touring drummer, which lasted until the COVID-19 lockdowns, included an NPR Tiny Desk Concert among the memorable moments.
“A lot of my connections (with national musicians) I have now, I gained through that band,” Jimenez-Cruz said. “And all because I was young and willing to go to Portland and sleep on couches for two to three weeks between tours.”
Changing times
These experiences are now culminating in Rhythmia, a band that shares the same lineup as Cruz Control, which Jimenez-Cruz formed in 2023 primarily to play covers at local casino venues. Rhythmia currently includes Jimenez-Cruz on drums, Whitney Myer on vocals, Zack Teran on bass, Lucas Arizu on guitar and flute, and Joey Grimes on keyboards. Jimenez-Cruz said Cruz Control will still play regular shows at venues such as the Peppermill, but with guest singers in place of Myer to distinguish the two groups.
“When we do the Peppermill, it’s like a four-or-five-hour cover-band lounge thing, and we stick some originals in there,” he said. “When we started writing more tunes, we were like, ‘OK, we want to make this into two entities.’”
Rhythmia is democratic, unlike Cruz Control, which a band led by Jimenez-Cruz.
“We’ve all been sidemen for so long. Now we can do something that we can call our own and not feel like sidemen.”
Miguel Jimenez-Cruz, on Rhythmia
“We’re all writing, and we all have a say in it,” he said. “Even when it was just a cool cover band, that was my end goal secretly—to make it something really serious where we all wrote our own songs. And these are all such good friends of mine, and we just belong together. I want everyone to feel like their ideas are valued.”
Jimenez-Cruz said he’s played with Teran for years, and has known Teran and Arizu since his days as a UNR student.
“I think that we always wanted to start a band like that, and we finally found the right time to do it, because we’ve all been sidemen for so long,” Jimenez-Cruz said. “Now we can do something that we can call our own and not feel like sidemen.”
Diversity to the fore
So far, Rhythmia has recorded four songs at Archive Group Studios in Reno, with more to follow by the end of the year. Jimenez-Cruz said he hopes the band can release a single by the end of summer.
Sonically, Rhythmia goes beyond Cruz Control’s mix of Latin rhythms with jazz, soul and hip-hop accents. He compared their sound to artists like Radiohead, the hip-hop meets-psychedelic group Hiatus Kaiyote, the early work of neo-soul artist Allen Stone, and experimental prog/metal band The Mars Volta. That mix speaks to the freedom from genre that Jimenez-Cruz said he’s seeking with Rhythmia, but with a structure that keeps it grounded and easy for audiences to like.
“We come from the jazz world, where we’re all music theory nerds,” he said. “So we can make things super-complicated a lot. I think the challenge is simplifying a lot of things and keeping it within a boundary, pulling it back so a wider range of people can be into it.”
The next Rhythmia show is for the Live at Lakeview Series, taking place Aug. 6 at Lakeview Commons in South Lake Tahoe. Although it’s still being advertised as a Cruz Control show, Jimenez-Cruz said Rhythmia material that will be featured, and that they’ll announce the new name at the show.
Besides the band project, Jimenez-Cruz also teaches drums. He said he feels a lot of joy from this aspect of his musical life, and it’s another reason why he’s sold on continuing his music career as a Reno resident.
“I teach about three or four students a day, and I really like trying to inspire these kids to keep continuing with drums,” he said. “Because I want them to say to themselves, ‘It’s awesome to be a musician. You can make it happen; you just gotta believe in it.’”
The band—advertised as Cruz Control, but featuring material from Rhythmia—will perform as part of the Live at Lakeview Summer Music Series, at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 6 at Lakeview Commons, at 1004 Lakeview Ave., South Lake Tahoe, with opener Patrick Walsh. Follow Rhythmia on Instagram @rhythmia_official.