Omar Sosa knows freedom. Freedom to improvise. Freedom to inspire. Freedom to draw on a wide range of sounds to create spellbinding music.

He is a nomadic wanderer who collects the sounds of native cultures including cha-cha grooves, Monkish phrases, hip-hop beats and rhapsodic melodies. A gifted pianist and composer, he coaxes a unique sound out of the multi-national players in the Afreecanos quartet. Combining urban idioms with folkloric elements, his music transports you elsewhere: to the West African bush, the tropical marsh of Ecuador, a San Franciscan jazz club or the back roads of rural Cuba.

Likened to a Shaman, Omar Sosa’s music is spellbinding and intoxicating. Audiences find it difficult not to spontaneously jump to their feet and join Sosa in exotic chorus vocals. If you are in need of a little magic, let Sosa transport you with his meta-world music. Come fall under his spell.

Omar Sosa, piano and fender rhodes
Childo Tomas, electric bass
Marque Gilmore, drums
Leandro Saint-Hill, saxophone and flute

A Journey of Possibilities, Rhythms and Sounds
Omar Sosa

by Charles Martin

Few countries of any size can claim as large a donation to the world's music as can the tiny island nation of Cuba. European and American composers have been profitably mining the country's musical landscape since the 19th century. Cuban compositions such as Malagueña, which are thought by many to be Spanish, now inhabit the world’s musical soul. And forms such as the habanera, chachachá, rumba, conga and, more recently, salsa, have become so much the property of dancers and bands everywhere that one scarcely remembers their origin in Cuban folk music.

Jazz has relied on the contagious rhythms of Cuba to supply regular infusions of energy, ever since the bandleader Machito and trumpeter Mario Bauzá - both from Havana – began seasoning American jazz with their style in the late 1930s. Afro-Cuban music is probably the most commercially successful subspecies of what we call World Music.

Composer and pianist Omar Sosa has brought a new twist to the never-ending cross-fertilization between Cuban music and urban jazz. Not content with the now traditional Cuban/jazz blend, Sosa has set out to explore and fuse musical worlds, including French chanson, North African trance music and European folk songs.

Sosa was born in Camagüey, Cuba, a large inland city, where he began studying percussion at the age of eight. At home his music listening was eclectic from an early age: the famed Cuban Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Chucho Valdés and classical music. Cuba’s long legacy as an international crossroads had left its mark on the island’s music, and hence on Sosa.

Eventually he moved to Havana to study at the Escuela Nacional de Musica. Since the marimba, his favourite instrument, was not taught there, he switched to piano. It was later, at Havana’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte, that Sosa became aware of the immense legacy of artists like Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. He was particularly drawn to the music of Thelonious Monk, whose free, expressive and idiosyncratic style is mirrored in Sosa’s playing to this day.

Sosa finished his formal training in 1983. His grand international experiment began some years later when he moved to Quito, Ecuador. There he became immersed in folk culture and launched his own jazz fusion ensemble, Entrenoz. Following that he spent several years in Spain.

In 1995 Sosa moved to San Francisco, where his vigorous Latin-inflected jazz found a willing audience. His first US recording, Omar Omar, is an extremely original solo piano statement, reminiscent of keyboard pioneers such as Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk in spirit, but harmonically a different creature altogether.

Sosa became known for music characterized by restless, shifting soundscapes and unorthodox instrumental combinations. His 2002 album, Sentir, featured Moroccan and Venezuelan musicians, a rapper, a Cuban vocalist and Sosa playing in a style that tended to overwhelm listeners with its sheer exuberance. During that period one was just as likely to hear an oud, a balafon or a djembe as a guitar or saxophone in one of his ensembles. Don Heckman of The Los Angeles Times wrote that Sosa’s music back then was an “extraordinary example of state-of-the-art world jazz, splendidly illustrating how entrancing the music can become when it is open and receptive to global input and interaction."

The 21st century brought worldwide recognition to Sosa. Sentir earned a Grammy and a Latin Grammy nomination, and was named the Afro-Caribbean Jazz Album of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association in New York. In 2003 the Smithsonian Institution presented Sosa with a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the development of Latin music in the US.

That year also saw the debut of Sosa's first work for symphony orchestra, entitled From Our Mother, performed at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California by the Oakland East Bay Symphony. The 45-minute work combined folk music from Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador with modern jazz harmonies.

In 2003 Sosa celebrated a debut of another type: the birth of his son, Lonious Said Sosa, which he commemorated with the piano album A New Life. A much more relaxed and contemplative recording than the ones for which Sosa is usually known, A New Life revolves around the themes of childbirth, infancy and fatherhood.

Sosa's most recent album is Afreecanos, a joyous, eclectic and mysterious recording bringing together musicians from Africa, Cuba, Brazil and France to celebrate the rich heritage of African music in jazz and Latin music.

Afreecanos blends a horn section – a new venture for Sosa – with a panoply of folk instruments, including the African kora and ngoni, and percussion instruments such as batá, timbales, kongoman, mbira and talking drum. Sosa gives fresh expression to Afro-Cuban musical forms like the rumba, imbuing them with an ethereal, dream-like spirit. Folk music of the earthiest sort meets urbane jazz sounds.

The most fascinating aspect of the musical journey Sosa is taking is that it is endless – the road forks again and again, opening up new possibilities, new rhythms to explore and new sounds to discover from places yet unvisited.

The world has come to recognize that Sosa is on to something new and powerful. After a recent performance at the opening of Carnegie Hall’s new Zankel Hall, Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote that Sosa has “a ferocious flair for rhythm and a keen musical wit”. Composer John Adams (Nixon in China, The Flowering Tree) noted that “…his piano playing is sui generis: It has obvious roots in Cuban music, but he’s taken his approach to the keyboard into completely new regions”.

Globalisation is, for some, an economic concept. For Sosa it is a personal mission, a way of seeing the world not as isolated and distinct musical regions, but as one immense arena where Cuban, Brazilian, European, hip-hop, jazz and many other traditions meet and mingle. From his beginnings on a tiny island he has caught the world’s ear, and in that ear he has continued to pour his unique and inspiring sound.

Charles Martin is a jazz bassist and writer. For many years he presented the jazz show The Sound of Surprise on RTHK Radio 3.