Tranquil it wasn’t. Justin Garcia found a cluster of notes on his fretboard, and bassist Brendan Daily answered with a tense passage of his own. Drummer Ray Carega matched the bottom-string growl of Garcia’s guitar with an urgent pattern on the snare and low tom — a signature, a call to action, a statement of ferocity to come. Within moments, the musicians were locked together in “Tranquilo,” a propulsive groove that seemed to speak of ambition, frustration, the demands of the day, time slipping away, and the intoxications and bewilderments of life. Then, from the sides of the stage at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd) came the dancers: Elaine Baez and Ty Gibson, graceful but a little harried, checking invisible watches and scrolling imaginary phones, fighting through the distractions to find each other. Like the musicians, they were there to help Garcia tell a story without saying a single word.
There’s a style of music in which long instrumental passages are expected to communicate as a book or a movie might. We call it progressive rock, and though it had its heyday in the early ‘70s, it was always too good to go away completely. Garcia, a born tale-spinner with a knack for generating musical drama, had leaned toward moody prog on De El Vacio [2024], his excellent prior project; with Luz De La Luna [2025], he’s thrown open the gates of delirium. Echoes of Traffic, Abraxas-era Santana, and Pink Floyd at the peak of David Gilmour’s glory were unmistakable at Garcia’s generous, intelligent, consistently exciting rock show on Friday night. Just as Yes might do on a progressive rock cruise, Garcia and his band played the new set in its entirety, as if it was a classic that everybody knew down to the riff. This was a gutsy call. It could have backfired. Instead, it landed brilliantly. And it reminded us that the album — a series of songs arranged in sequence and arranged to create a specific emotional trajectory — has never been improved upon as a storytelling vehicle.
De El Vacio (“from the void”) often felt Chris Isaak-spacious. Luna retains much of its predecessor’s desert-rock starkness and its Morricone overtones, with long, lonesome, note-bent guitar passages and gunslinging brass. The Latin rhythms that have always underpinned the Cuban-American guitarist’s compositions remain central to his sound. There are still bold border-crossings happening in his music, and, occasionally, transmissions from a state of solitude. But this time around, Garcia is treating cumbia, boléro, electric blues, b-movie soundtrack music, funk, and jazz fusion as a progressive rocker might, combining musical substances, switching things up and blurring lines between styles, eye-dropping influences here and there according to narrative demands, always keeping an eye on the substance in the beaker as it bubbles. The implicit main character of these instrumental stories may still be alone with his thoughts. But he’s stepped out of the vacuum and on to the mountaintop, and he can see for miles and miles and miles.
In order to realize this vision, he’s had to expand the cast. At Art House Productions, Garcia appeared with seven sidepeople and two dancers, including trumpeter Martin Shapiro, baritone saxophonist Bryan Cowan, cellist Hannah Burke, and the dextrous organist and imaginative sonic colorist Dylan DeFeo. Not all of these players were onstage at once, but because the musicians were so sensitive to each other — and because the sound was so good — the large-ensemble songs were highlights of the show. It helped that none of the jams were overlong. Garcia, cool and composed behind shades that never left his face, directed traffic through small musical and gestural cues, giving each of his mates their moments to shine (Cowan’s use of the full and thunderous bass capacity of his horn gave Art House a memorable shake), and reining them in when it was time for him to seize the spotlight for himself.
Seize it he did. He held it by making choices that were consistently interesting, and soloing with a sense of adventure, and humor, and, occasionally, in the spirit of cross-cultural transcendence. Garcia has a knack for raising the listener’s hair with notes that initially seem like left turns, and then, through some whammy-hammer and phasing sorcery, end up feeling like the only way to go. Though he made the most of his tremolo unit and his amplifier’s capacity for old-school reverberation, his best special effect was his unconvential sense of melody. To listen to Garcia is to be on your toes. You don’t know what dusty trail he’s taking you down. But you know he knows, and his unflappability encourages us to follow.
To reinforce the classic album-era mood, Justin Garcia decorated the set with color-swirled and astral-travelling projections by Steve Pavlovsky of Liquid Light Lab. In some tie-dyed quadrant of heaven, Bill Graham must have approved. The light show would also have been appropriate for the main support set from John “nuNU” Nunez, a guitarist and songwriter with an broad, jazz-influenced chord vocabulary and an idiosyncratic approach to the fretboard. If Garcia’s playing recalled Gilmour and Santana, nuNU’s fleet, crystal-clear passages and summer rainstorms of notes — many of which refused to begin or end on the downbeat — evoked Larry Carlton. Nunez matched his playing to a supple rhythm section, an electric pianist, and a wave-riding synthesist with a Dave Smith Instruments Prophet for a surfboard. Nunez’s wisp of a voice often got lost in the sound. That may have been by design. But the songs only caught fire when he wasn’t at the microphone.
No such problems for Giselle Bellas, Jersey City’s fiercest believer in the practical consequences of singing out. In her five song opening set, Justin Garcia’s fellow Cuban-American singer and songwriter was wordy, full-throated, theatrical, and emotionally forthright, airing new composition “Spectacle” alongside a passionate interpretation of the ageless Mexican folk song “La Llorona.” Garcia (and DeFeo) backed her up with spare accompaniment that felt as if each lingering note had been carefully curated to reinforce the drama of her storytelling.
Garcia’s attunement to Bellas’s music felt like more than mere appreciation of a kindred writer. It was also a gesture of goodwill between local artists walking complicated paths, and who need, and deserve, good company on their journey. Garcia, a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Jersey City Arts and Culture Trust Fund, spoke to the crowd about how important it was for local artists to gather together and listen to each other. It was encouraging to see Lauren Rosato, Celeste Landa, Sean Kiely, Jacob Tremont, Maidin, James Calleo, and several members of Forget the Whale in the capacity crowd; surely other excellent local musicians who weren’t in my section joined in the standing ovation for Garcia’s set. The show was co-produced by Mike “Philosopher Pirate” Kuzan of The Latest Noise, a singer and songwriter himself who has helped make Art House Productions a reliable place to hear new voices. We’re not all the way yet to Garcia’s dream. But we’ve got something cooking. And we’ve got an excellent new album to spin.
