Dear friends,

One of the gifts of releasing Whispered Awakening has been the opportunity to reflect on the unexpected paths that led to these pieces. The stories behind “Guaguancó” and “Mélancolie” are quite different, yet both reveal the ways music can connect seemingly distant places, memories, and traditions. I hope you enjoy the story behind each piece and videos below.

“Mélancolie” 

The gestation of “Mélancolie” began in May 2015. That month, my friend, the acclaimed jazz pianist Kevin Hays, and I committed to writing at least one minute of music each day. “Mélancolie” was one of those composition sketches and was almost fully realized; I was able to complete the composition in a week in July 2025.

I recorded a video for the piece in late August 2025. The performance was fine and the footage looked beautiful, but something felt incomplete. After some reflection, I realized that “Mélancolie” was, in part, a musical story about our abrupt move from my childhood home in New Jersey when I was eight years old, in August 1969, the day after Jimi Hendrix's closing performance at Woodstock.

An unexpected idea came to me: What if I returned to that house and recorded the video in my childhood bedroom, a room I had not seen since August 21, 1969? By an extraordinary stroke of luck, I discovered the house was in the process of being sold. I reached out with little expectation of hearing back, but a week later I received a response: an estate sale was taking place, and I should contact the executor. His answer was immediate: “Yes, let's do it—but you'll have to do it tomorrow, since it's the last day of the sale.”

So, on an unseasonably warm Saturday in late October, I finally came home, fulfilling a wish that eight-year-old boy had carried for many years. The experience was overwhelming. Everything seemed to be waiting for me, suspended in time. The room embraced me like a loved one I hadn't seen in over fifty years. Despite the challenges of filming during an estate sale, the video came out beautifully, and “Mélancolie” was finally able to tell its story in the place where it was born.

“Guaguancó” 

It must have been the late 1980s when I first heard the opening bars of "Fiesta en el Solar" by Arsenio Rodríguez. There was something immediately familiar in it — vaguely reminiscent of an early recording by Bo Diddley, yet more stripped down, driven by the congas and the 2–3 pulse of the claves. Against that, the biting sound of a guitarist whose rhythmic phrasing felt eerily close to that of Jimi Hendrix.

That was my introduction to the Cuban rhythm of rumba guaguancó, the same rhythm that informs “Guaguancó,” one of the closing pieces on my new album, Whispered Awakening. Having immediately sensed its connection to early North American R&B, I felt it offered an ideal framework to explore those relationships within a solo guitar piece.

What I didn’t expect was how naturally it would also connect to the Appalachian two-finger banjo style, one of the oldest traditions from the mountain regions where bluegrass music was born. In the video for “Guaguancó”, you can see me move between these different musical languages, rendering each on a separate guitar.

Physical CDs and digital copies of Whispered Awakening are available on Bandcamp. The album is also available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

Thank you for listening.

Best,
Tomas