On Niebla, New York–based, Puerto Rican-born guitarist and composer Gabriel Vicéns draws from the rhythmic foundations of bomba and plena and places them in direct conversation with modern jazz and experimental improvisation.
Rather than treating these traditions as fixed forms, the album approaches them as flexible structures, reshaped through shifting time signatures, open-ended passages, and a deliberate use of space and restraint. The result is a record that balances technical precision with a broader interest in temporality, identity, and the evolving role of cultural memory within contemporary jazz.
Vicéns describes it as a conversation across time, and you can hear that tension everywhere. There’s history embedded in the rhythms, but also a kind of searching—an openness to what those forms can become when they’re allowed to drift, to fracture, to reassemble in new ways.
The ensemble plays a huge role in that. Roman Filiú’s alto sax cuts through with sharp, searching lines, while Rick Rosato and E.J. Strickland lock into grooves that feel both grounded and unstable. Victor Pablo’s percussion keeps everything tethered to something deeper, more rooted, while Vitor Gonçalves’ piano moves between structure and dissolution. Together, they don’t so much “perform” the material as navigate it—feeling their way through shifting rhythmic grids, open space, and sudden bursts of intensity.
There are moments of propulsion—tracks like the title piece or “Stray Dogs” push forward with a kind of restless energy—but what lingers most are the spaces in between. The sections where time seems to loosen its grip. Vicéns has been exploring temporality for years, and here it becomes central: music not as a fixed timeline, but as something elastic, something that can stretch, fold, and hold multiple states at once.
That idea extends beyond the music itself. There’s a quiet resistance embedded in Niebla—not overt, not didactic, but present. A refusal of speed and immediacy. In a world that constantly demands movement, productivity, resolution, this record leans into slowness, into repetition, into the kind of listening that asks something of you in return.
Even the instrumentation carries that weight. The use of a handmade 1987 classical guitar by Puerto Rican luthier Fidencio Díaz isn’t just a sonic choice—it’s a connection point, a thread tying the present back to a lineage of craft, of sound, of place.
Niebla ultimately exists in that in-between space: between past and future, structure and freedom, rhythm and silence. It’s not trying to resolve those tensions. It lets them sit, breathe, and blur.
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