On NUEVA TIMBA, the new Blue Note album from Cuban-born pianist Harold López-Nussa, the jazz vanguard meets multiple eras of Cuba’s musical history with results that are at once accessible, life-affirming, and strikingly accomplished. The album, which will be released Sept. 5, features a core of unmatched talent—Harold’s brother, Ruy Adrian López-Nussa, on drums; Luques Curtis on bass; and the harmonica virtuoso Grégoire Maret—and presents a definitive vision for the future of Latin jazz. López-Nussa has also shared the album’s lead single “Bonito y Sabroso,” a vibrant modernization of a Benny Moré classic that adds psychedelic hues with electronics and the beat-making of José Angel Blanco, a.k.a. El Negro WADPRO.

NUEVA TIMBA is the second album López-Nussa has recorded for Blue Note following 2023’s Timba a la Americana. A live/studio hybrid, it was captured at the club Le Duc des Lombards, a jazz institution in Paris, and then reshaped and enhanced in post-production. The project’s musical aim is twofold: documenting López-Nussa’s thrilling prowess as a live performer while also embracing the pristine audio and conceptual ingenuity that’s possible in the studio.

For all its virtuosity and innovation, however, NUEVA TIMBA is foremost a journey—a deeply personal narrative rooted in profound, often painful life changes that reflects López-Nussa’s recent move from Cuba to France. The album tells the very real story of a man displaced: a young father finding his way in a new country while missing his homeland with heartrending intensity; all the while, he’s nursing other emotional wounds including the passing of his mother, and the compounding torment brings him to a state of despair. Slowly but surely, sunshine begins to poke through the clouds, and he discovers a path forward. Something like happiness returns to the horizon. Consider NUEVA TIMBA musical tears of joy.