Tag: Omar Sosa

Everything about the music of Omar Sosa seems not only to say that “Tradition is a wonderful reality,” but also something else: “not understanding...

For more than 20 years now, Omar Sosa – Cuban composer and pianist and seven-time Grammy nominee – is constantly expanding his exciting discography. Transparent Water, released...

Omar Sosa and Yilian Cañizares are both astonishingly gifted musicians whose reputations have been somewhat eclipsed (grossly unfairly, one might add) by those instrumentalists...

Pianist Omar Sosa and violinist-vocalist Yilian Cañizares have come together to create Aguas, a beautiful and very personal album. Featuring their compatriot, percussionist Inor...

Special 4-Night Residency - Omar Sosa @ SFJAZZ Center April 20 - 23, 2017 When Omar Sosa talks about his formative influences, he always starts with...

Blue Note NYC: Omar Sosa's Quarteto Afrocubano Thursday thru Sunday, March 31-April 3, 2016 Quarteto AfroCubano marks a homecoming for Omar to the influences of his...

Essential Albums: Mark Weinstein's Cuban Roots and Cuban Roots Revisited The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Mark Weinstein in 2006....

Few drummers have had such a profound effect on Cuban music as Pancho Quinto. Superlatives are often risqué in music, but suffice it to...

With a mandolin player such as Hamilton de Holanda doing such wondrous things with Pixinguinha, you might be forgiven for thinking that the guitar...

Cuban composer/pianist/bandleader Omar Sosa brings his signature style that mixes jazz influences with Latin rhythms, North African percussion, and spoken word to BRIC House...

"Ilé" couldn’t be more appropriate a name for pianist Omar Sosa’s collection of compositions that oftentimes mine the more celestial aspects of...

Since he emigrated from Cuba in 1993, Omar Sosa has forged a distinctive musical path, fusing an array of jazz, world music, hip-hop, and...

Composer, pianist, bandleader Omar Sosa has a gift for transforming a performance into an event. He and his Afro Cuban Quartet demonstrated as much...

Omar Sosa has not sounded so melancholy, so soulful and so spiritual than he does on Senses, a solo piano record that he has...

2013 was a remarkably good year for the New York music scene and a particularly good year for Cuban music. Producer Dita Sullivan presented an intriguing (never before seen) Cuban Drum Series at the Jazz Standard...

Omar Sosa is an extraordinary musician embodying both the magical virtuosity of musicianship and its soulful roots all in one. Actually one could not...

There is a visceral intensity to Cantos Del Sexto Col, the fiery album by reeds and woodwinds maestro Enrique Fernandez. This comes from the ferocious viscosity that swirls and swaggers in what appears to be a myriad of layers of sounds emerging from the instruments he plays, seemingly all at once. Each is annunciated with an apocalyptic shout and all meld with molten splendour into a soup of idiomatic musical dialects—spiritual and profane [...]

This is the recording that Maraca’s fans have been waiting for. Recorded live at the Grand Theater in Havana, Cuba (2010), it presents Maraca’s collaboration with the Havana Chamber Orchestra and includes standout contributions from pianist Harold Lopez-Nussa, Japanese violinist Sayaka, saxophonist David Sanchez, drummer Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez, percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo and others. The recording takes the listener on a musical journey [...]

If anything, Omar Sosa has always been a spiritual artist. Connected for generations with the practice of Santería, Sosa was surrounded by the worship together with a communion of saints, but in a truly Afro-centric manner. The particularly molten staccato of the batá drums has held sway in the melodic rhythms of his music. In fact, some of his finest earlier work has burst forth as out of a spiritual vortex shuffling with forthright swagger, churning in [...]

Omar Sosa inhabits two worlds. One in which all humans live and the other is the spirit world. On Ceremony (Music arranged by Jaques Morelenbaum) a record that he made with the NDR Big Band, he has opened the door to both worlds. Moreover, with Jaques Morelenbaum’s masterful arrangements of his (Sosa’s) music these worlds are that much closer. Sosa has been crossing the threshold between this world and the spirit one [...]