Harold López-Nussa Timba a la Americana

Harold López-Nussa

Harold López-Nussa - Piano

Grégoire Maret - Harmonica

Luques Curtis - Bass

Ruy Adrián López-Nussa - Drums

Cuban-born pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa begins an exciting new chapter of his fascinating career with his Blue Note debut Timba a la Americana, a vibrant album teeming with joy and pathos that was inspired by the pianist’s recent decision to leave his Cuban homeland and begin a new life in France. Produced by Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League, Timba a la Americana unveils a brand- new sound across 10 dynamic original compositions performed by a tight-knit band featuring harmonica virtuoso Grégoire Maret, Luques Curtis on bass, Bárbaro “Machito” Crespo on congas, and Harold’s brother Ruy Adrián López-Nussa on drums. Harold traces the origins of Timba a la Americana to a day during his family’s first winter after leaving Cuba to live in Toulouse, France. It was cold. He was homesick. Harold found himself flipping through
voice memos on his phone, listening to jams and fragments of song ideas he’d documented years before. These happened on gigs, or in the music space of his home, or on the street when he was seized with an idea. The little seedlings of songs ported him back to the rhythmic communication that was part of his everyday life in Cuba. “It was emotional for me to be in France and listen back to these ideas from the past because the transition for me was not easy,” Harold recalls. “In Cuba, musicians would come to my house several times a week, to play, to party. My daughters grew up going to concerts every week. We were very active with music.”
Those recorded inspirations did more than simply sharpen Harold’s longing for his previous life halfway around the world. They confirmed what he already knew: His next creative moves were going to be different. Very different. The pianist had released a string of acclaimed Latin jazz projects under his own name and participated in collaborative all-star assemblages like Ninety Miles with Stefon Harris, David Sanchez, and Christian Scott. Still, he felt a strong urge to escape the conventional thinking about song form and structure that’s defined Latin jazz since the 1950s. The ideas on his phone – lyrical melodies, intricate odd-meter vamps – suggested new freedoms, unconventional forms. He wrestled with the challenging shapes of the
fragments until they became songs. “It’s almost like I needed to think about Cuba from far away,” Harold says. “I was having all these feelings of challenge, new life, new things going on for us. It was a lot of new, and of course that would be reflected in the music, but I was still feeling this conflict: I want this music to sound like Cuba, but how can it if I’m not there?” Those questions, meditations really, on distance and dislocation led Harold to create in ways he hadn’t before. In collaboration with League—a friend of many years who had first heard Harold on a trip to Cuba and later invited the pianist to perform at Snarky Puppy’s GroundUp Music Festival in Miami—the two sought new settings for the clave patterns that are the heartbeat of Cuban music. They grabbed elements of danzon, the foundational dance that began in Matanzas in the late 1800s, and the stately son tumbao riffs that frame the songs of Benny Moré and so many others. They worked with ancient bata drum rhythms used to summon the deities, then incorporated them into the choppy polyrhythmic agitations of modern improvising collectives. They linked the catcalling mambos of Dizzy Gillespie and Machito to modern ideas about song structure.

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