The word “happening” carries history. In the art world of the 1960s, a happening was an event designed to exist only once: unrepeatable, unscripted, alive in a way that documentation could approximate but struggle to fully contain. Tom Ricci chose the word deliberately. Happening in Buenos Aires was recorded on June 20, 2023, at Borges 1975 in the city where Ricci was born, with three South American musicians he had engaged ahead of the performance, the four of them going onstage having skipped a full band rehearsal. The title is a document of that fact.

What you hear on this album is music that could only have been made in that room, on that night, by those four people finding each other in real time. Before anything else, the musicians. Ricci on vocals and guitar, Pablo Sanguinetti on piano, Bruno Migotto on bass, Oscar Giunta on drums. Argentine, Brazilian, Argentine: a South American rhythm section built around an Argentine-American vocalist returning to his birthplace. The cultural layering in that arrangement is central to the music. It is the music. The album moves between American jazz standards, Brazilian bossa nova, Argentine tango, blues, and a singular reinterpretation of Radiohead, and those categories coexist so naturally because every musician on this stage carries more than one of them in their blood.

Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” opens the album at six minutes, and the length is appropriate. Ricci‘s vocal approach here is unhurried, intimate, allowing the song to breathe at its own pace. A warmth builds across the six minutes, earned through patience rather than announced. Sanguinetti‘s piano moves around the vocal with care, finding space rather than filling it, and the rhythm section lays a foundation so steady it almost becomes invisible. By the time “Night & Day” arrives with its bossa nova coloring and slightly brighter tempo, the album has already established the register in which it will operate: sophisticated, attentive, comfortable in its own authority.

My attention sharpened on “Naranjo en Flor.” The song is a landmark of Argentine tango, composed by the Expósito brothers (and I’ll admit tango is a tradition I approach with some caution, aware of how easy it is to hear only its most theatrical surface), and Sanguinetti‘s arrangement reframes it as a jazz waltz. The tango origins and the jazz arrangement are genuinely inseparable here, which has everything to do with who is playing and where the recording was made.

“Besame Mucho” has been recorded so many times that a new version must justify its existence through specificity of approach. Ricci justifies his. The blues-rock vocabulary he brings to the guitar work pulls the song away from its bolero origins toward something earthier and more cinematic, while the vocal retains the tenderness the melody demands. Ricci stretches the song to include himself rather than relocating it entirely.

And then “Creep.” Playing a Radiohead song in a jazz setting is a choice that invites skepticism (and, honestly, a certain amount of eye-rolling from people who’ve seen this done badly), and Ricci handles it by treating the material with full seriousness. The arrangement moves slowly, building from near-classical restraint toward an emotional peak that the original reaches through distortion and volume. Ricci reaches it through patience. What the jazz setting does is slow the song’s alienation down enough to examine it, and “Creep” turns out to sustain that kind of attention. What remains, once the novelty dissolves, is the song’s feeling, which is considerable.

“What A Wonderful World” occupies a different emotional register entirely. Ricci has spoken about connecting with this song as a child and returning to it here as a father, and the performance carries both relationships simultaneously. The vocal sounds earned, the mark of a singer who has lived with a song long enough that it means something personal. The six-minute runtime allows the emotion to develop at the pace of genuine feeling rather than concert efficiency.

“Just Friends” and “My One & Only Love” occupy the middle of the tracklist with the ease of musicians playing for the pleasure of it, moments where the interplay matters more than the destination.

Albums recorded live carry a particular kind of pressure on their final track, because the audience in the room already knows how the night ended, and the listener at home is hearing it for the first time. “There Will Never Be Another You” navigates that gap with ease. By this point the four musicians have found their collective footing so fully that the closer feels less like a conclusion and more like a conversation that happened to be winding down.

Something worth noting: this album gets better the further you are from the first listen. The standards reveal more on the third pass, the interplay between Sanguinetti and Giunta becomes more specific, and Ricci‘s vocal choices start to read as decisions rather than instincts. Whether that depth was planned or simply emerged from four skilled musicians finding each other in a room on one particular night in Buenos Aires, the album makes the question feel beside the point. It happened. Here it is.

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