The first volume of "Blueprints" honors the personal relationships and mentors that helped form a foundation for music and living. It features five original compositions along with jazz standards.

Jeff Cebulski of Chicago Jazz Magazine wrote: "It was Rutz’s delivery on the ballad “Very Marie” that made me think of Hargrove. Rutz, here, waxes lyrical in a way I hadn’t heard since Roy visited Chicago his last time. And the upper-registered, but serene, expression on one of the album’s two covers, a spritely “September in the Rain,” also struck me as Hargrove-like."