Colombian musician's new album: The Art of Less - Samuel Torres and the Freedom of Three

There is something almost radical, in today’s maximalist jazz landscape, about choosing less.

For Samuel Torres—a musician whose résumé stretches from symphonic works to big band arrangements—the decision to strip everything down to three instruments on Trio Libre feels less like an aesthetic experiment than a philosophical pivot. After years of expanding outward, he turns inward, reducing his palette to piano, vibraphone, and congas, and asking a deceptively simple question: how much music can exist inside so little? 

Musician Samuel Torres' Instagram

The answer, it turns out, is: quite a lot.

At the center of the project is a carefully balanced trio—pianist Carmen Staaf, vibraphonist Felipe Fournier, and Torres himself on congas. The instrumentation is unusual even within the elastic boundaries of Latin jazz. There is no bass to anchor the harmony in a conventional sense, no horns to carry melodic weight, no drum kit to dictate swing in familiar terms. Instead, each instrument is forced into a state of heightened responsibility: the piano expands and contracts between harmony and rhythm, the vibraphone hovers like a luminous bridge between melody and texture, and the congas—Torres’ voice—become both heartbeat and narrative. 

What emerges is not absence, but exposure.

Torres has described the project as a deliberate move away from “the formula of how Latin jazz is constructed,” a genre that often thrives on layered percussion, brass arrangements, and dense rhythmic interplay. Here, there is nowhere to hide. Silence becomes structural. Space becomes compositional. Each note must justify its existence. 

And yet, the album resists austerity. If anything, Trio Libre feels intimate rather than minimal—closer to chamber music than to a stripped-down jam session. The trio operates like a conversational triangle, with ideas passing fluidly between players. A motif introduced on piano may dissolve into vibraphone resonance before being punctuated by a syncopated conga phrase. The absence of a traditional rhythm section does not diminish momentum; it redistributes it.

Trio Libre: In his latest album, Samuel Torres explores the power of just three instrumentsSamuel Torres

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Source: NPR

Torres’ musical references reveal the conceptual ambition behind this restraint. There are echoes of Tito Puente—particularly in rhythmic gestures that nod to classics like Oye Como Va—but these are refracted rather than replicated. The lineage extends further back, into the architecture of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose contrapuntal thinking and chromatic movement Torres has cited as a source of fascination. 

It is an unexpected pairing, but a revealing one. Bach’s music, after all, thrives on clarity—on the independence of lines that nonetheless cohere into a unified whole. In Trio Libre, Torres seems to be chasing a similar ideal within a Latin jazz framework: rhythmic independence without fragmentation, harmonic richness without density.

There are also moments of striking personal vulnerability. One piece, written for his wife, violinist Sarah Alden, introduces Torres’ own voice for the first time on record—a gesture that feels almost disarmingly direct in the context of such a conceptually driven album. The track operates as a quiet counterpoint to the project’s intellectual rigor: a reminder that reduction can also be a path to emotional clarity. 

The album’s release—scheduled for May 1—marks another chapter in a career that has consistently resisted easy categorization. Born in Bogotá and shaped by collaborations with figures ranging from Arturo Sandoval to Chick Corea, Torres has moved fluidly between traditions, from Afro-Latin rhythms to contemporary jazz and orchestral composition. What distinguishes Trio Libre is not its departure from that trajectory, but its distillation of it.

In a cultural moment that often equates scale with significance, Torres offers a counterargument: that limitation can be a form of expansion. By reducing his ensemble to its barest essentials, he uncovers a different kind of complexity—one that lives not in accumulation, but in interaction.

Listen closely, and the trio begins to feel less like three instruments than like three perspectives circling the same idea. Not a reduction, but a recalibration.

And perhaps that is the quiet provocation at the heart of Trio Libre: that freedom, as the title suggests, is not always found in adding more—but in knowing what to leave behind.

Photo: Musician Samuel Torres' Instagram