The story
During his first winter after leaving Cuba for Toulouse, Harold López-Nussa was cold, homesick, and scrolling through voice memos on his phone: jams, melodies, fragments he had recorded years earlier in Havana. Away from home, those half-finished ideas sounded different. They became the seeds of Timba a la Americana, his Blue Note debut, and the beginning of a new chapter in which distance did not loosen his connection to Cuban music. It sharpened it.
That idea runs even deeper through Nueva Timba. López-Nussa reaches across generations of Cuban music, shrinking the sweep of Benny Moré’s big band into a small group, reimagining Ernesto Lecuona through classical touch and contemporary rhythm, and returning to “Niña Con Violín,” a piece written by his pianist uncle that has lived inside the family since childhood. Electronics and modern jazz textures enter the picture, but the old music is never treated as something under glass. It is material to play with, argue with, and make present again.
“Radical, but kind of inevitable too.”
López-Nussa comes from a household where music was ordinary life: his mother taught piano, his father and brother played drums, and his uncle is a pianist. Now a Blue Note artist, he has found that living elsewhere changed what he notices in the music he grew up around. “You look to Cuba in a different way,” he has said.
If Cuban piano and timba are already part of your musical map, there is a lot here to recognize. If they are not, Harold López-Nussa offers a generous place to begin: with an artist hearing familiar music anew, and inviting us to do the same.