Omar Sosa

   Composer-pianist-band leader Omar Sosa's musical trajectory traces the Diaspora from Cuba to Brazil; from Central America to Ecuador's African-descent communities; from San Francisco and New York to Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the African continent. True to his Afro-Cuban origins, Omar Sosa fashions a spirited vision of uncompromising artistic generosity that embraces humanity at large.

Winner of the Smithsonian Associates' lifetime achievement award, a three-time GRAMMY nominee, and nominated twice for both the BBC World Music awards and the Jazz Journalists Association awards, Omar Sosa entwines the cultural traditions of Africa, Europe, and the Americas in a unique, cosmopolitan voice. Annually performing upwards of 100 shows on six continents, Omar has appeared in venues as diverse as the Blue Note (New York, Milan, and Tokyo), Carnegie Hall, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Getty Center, London's Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall, Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, and Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt; festivals including Monterey Jazz, JVC Jazz, Montreal Jazz, North Sea Jazz, Helsinki, Grenoble Jazz, Montreux Jazz, Naples Jazz, Ravenna Jazz, Roma Jazz, Spoletto, WOMAD, and Cape Town International Jazz; and universities on several continents.

Omar Sosa articulates a brilliant, thoroughly contemporary global jazz idiom that assumes ever-shifting form via a joyous, open-hearted, collaborative approach to musical creativity. Whether as a soloist, ensemble player, or bandleader, Omar creates a music that is simultaneously his own and the world's-reflecting an immersion in the batá drumming of Santería, the lyricism of the Cuban danzón, the Arabic lute or oud, North African percussion, European classical music, and world jazz. Sosa's attentive and imaginative melding of sounds from around the world marks him as a courageous and original global artist for the twenty-first century.

Omar Sosa (b. April 10, 1965) was raised in Camagüey, Cuba's largest inland city. His father, Sindulfo Sosa, taught history and philosophy, and was a school administrator. His mother, Maricusa Palacios, now retired and living in Havana, was a Telex operator for the electric utility. Sosa grew up listening to classical music and a range of popular artists including Nat King Cole, Count Basie, Orquesta Aragón, Benny Moré, Cachao, Frank Emilio Flynn, and Conjunto Folklórico Nacional. At age eight, Omar began studying percussion and marimba at the Camagüey conservatory; in Havana, as a teenager, he took up piano at the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Música, and rounded out his formal education at the Instituto Superior de Arte. Among his influences, Omar cites traditional Afro-Cuban music, European classical composers (including Chopin, Bartok, and Satie), Monk, Coltrane, Parker, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Chucho Valdés, and the pioneering Cuban jazz group Irakere.

Moving in 1993 to Ecuador, Omar immersed himself in the folkloric traditions of Esmeraldas, the northwest coast region whose African heritage includes the distinctive regional marimba tradition. He relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995, and soon invigorated the Latin jazz scene with his adventurous writing and percussive style. Subsequently, he has collaborated with artists from across Western Europe and all corners of the African continent.

Omar works with an array of African, Arabic, European, Indian, Latin, and North American musicians. Among his many associations are drummers and percussionists Steve Argüelles, Julio Barretto, Mino Cinelu, Miguel "Angá" Diaz, Marque Gilmore, Trilok Gurtu, Marcos Ilukán, Ramiro Musotto, Gustavo Ovalles, Pancho Quinto, Adam Rudolph, John Santos, Carlos "Patato" Valdés, and Orestes Vilató; singers Tim Eriksen, Lázaro Galarraga, Marta Galarraga, El Houssaine Kili, Xiomara Laugart, María Márquez, Will Power, Mola Sylla, the Tenores San Gavino de Oniferi-Sardinia, and Dhafer Youssef; trumpeter Paolo Fresu; and woodwind masters Paquito D'Rivera, Luis Depestre, Leandro Saint-Hill, and Mark Weinstein.

Prominent among Omar's recent projects is Across The Divide (Half Note, 2009), recorded live at the Blue Note in New York City. Across The Divide is a song cycle documenting the shared rhythms of Omar Sosa and Tim Eriksen, an intense vocalist, equally versed on guitar, fiddle and banjo, and a leading exponent of the enduring spirit of a North American music that transcends racial and cultural categories. The album is a narrative, a tale of musical and spiritual passage, melding and mingling seemingly disparate cultures yet highlighting the musical roots common to us all. Featured within are sampled readings from Langston Hughes, renowned giant of the Harlem Renaissance, whose words add lift to the musical journey. Eriksen brings the rock-ribbed spirit of white Protestant folk and sacred music to the project, in a revealing encounter with Sosa's grounding and African idioms of the New World. The result is an extraordinary and visionary work that is infused with all the dark fury of a nation's unredeemed history. Across The Divide achieves something heretofore unknown in contemporary U.S. jazz-a powerful encounter between Anglo North American folk traditions and the living spirit of the Diaspora, an audacious revelation whose ecumenical power is testimony to the promise of Gandhi, King, and the many other ancestral spirits that suffuse Sosa's artistry.

Another recent work is Tales From The Earth (Otá, 2009), led by flute player Mark Weinstein. The recording presents a thoroughly cosmopolitan outlook rooted in the rhythmic intensity and improvisatory, call-and-response spirit of Africa writ large. Artists of Cuban, Haitian, West African, European, African American, and Jewish American heritage, entered a Berlin studio for two days of intensive recording, without music or a predetermined conception, only a shared commitment to the communal, celebratory character that embodies the expressive riches of Mother Africa. Tales From The Earth resounds with Afro-Cuban traditions, featuring Omar on marimba and vibraphone, which he studied in Cuba's conservatories before switching to piano. Other guests include guitarist Jean Paul Bourelly (Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Pharoah Sanders, Cassandra Wilson); balafon master Aly Keita of the Ivory Coast; drummer Marque Gilmore (Roy Ayers, Steve Coleman, Graham Haynes, Toumani Diabate, Vernon Reid, Joe Zawinul, MeShell Ndegeocello, Susheela Ramen, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh); and singers Aho Luc Nicaise and Mathias Agbokou of Benin.

A major new project bears the fruit of Omar's first big-band collaboration, working with composer Jacques Morelenbaum and Hamburg's North German Radio (NDR) Big Band. Recorded in January 2008, it features arrangements from Omar's Spirit Of The Roots (1999) and Bembón (2000), growing out of a conversation with Hamburg producer Stefan Gerdes, who facilitated the connection. Morelenbaum has arranged for Antonio Carlos Jobim, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Cesária Evora, and Mariza, among many others.

Other notable ventures include Omar's Oda Africana, a composition for orchestra and jazz ensemble, which premiered in July 2009 at the Festival de Musicas Religiosas y del Mundo de Girona, Spain, featuring the Omar Sosa Quintet and the Jove Orquesta Athenea, conducted by Lluis Caballería. In addition, Omar was commissioned to compose From Our Mother for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Oakland East Bay Symphony, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He also has been a visiting artist at Dartmouth College and Princeton University.

New pursuits include work with Italy's Solis String Quartet, the Sardinian Isolanos project, and a new trio with Paolo Fresu and Trilok Gurtu. Notable video productions include Light In The Sky (from the 2008 Tudo é Jazz Festival in Ouro Preto, Brazil, directed by Aitor Echeverria), and an upcoming DVD of Omar's 2007 Java Jazz Festival performance.

Exemplifying Duke Ellington's highest accolade as a creator of music beyond category-manifest in some 20 recordings as a leader-Omar Sosa is a planetary musician in the most all-embracing connotation of world music. Sonic curiosity, a generous musical spirit, a commitment to the ensemble as the fundamental creative mode, and an openness to new sounds and their unusual combination, animate all that Omar does.

Omar's search for musical freedom transcends orthodoxy, as an artist who exemplifies Monk's determination never to play the same thing twice. He crafts a stylistically unique yet thoroughly contemporary global jazz idiom that celebrates the diversity of voices in the music of the Americas and far beyond.

Yet Omar always cultivates an intimate sense of connection with his own Afro-Cuban roots. As he relates, "Africa and the Diaspora represent an unequaled musical source. I have tried to express the continent's melodic contour, and its great rhythmic strength. Rhythm connects every people with the supreme Spirit. Every land has ways of calling the Spirits, to pull people together. Philosophically, through jazz-perhaps the Diaspora's freest genre-we have sought to combine the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa in an expression of freedom, a celebration of the Diaspora, alive in our times."