Omar Sosa Returns to Yoshi's

Cuban pianist Omar Sosa will be playing at Yoshi's Oakland, April 10-13. Celebrating the release of his new CD, Afreecanos, Sosa returns to the renowned jazz club with his new quartet, featuring Senegalese vocalist Mola Sylla, Mozambican electric bassist Childo Tomas, and American drummer Marque Gilmore. Shows are 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM Thursday through Saturday (April 10-12), and 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM Sunday (April 13). For tickets please call 510-238-9200 or visit http://www.yoshis.com/. For more information and complete tour schedule, please visit http://www.melodia.com/. Afreecanos dropped back in February. Below is an album review I wrote, originally published in Jazziz magazine.

Cuban pianist Omar Sosa is known for eschewing musical platitudes in favor of imaginative forays of transatlantic proportions. On Afreecanos (Otá Records) he frees-up Afro-Cuban forms by creating arrangements easily adapted by African musicians and folkloric instruments such as the ngoni, kora, and talking drum. Although Sosa’s detour from Cuban music cliches is really a continuum that maps out a bigger picture, much of the journey is rooted in his own Afro-Cuban spirituality, a search that begins from within and one that is at the core of his musical evolution. Featuring 20 musicians from Cuba, Brazil, France, and various African nations, Afreecanos captures the totality of what Sosa has been, up until now, alluding to in his body of work and that is that the mother of all mothers is Africa. The eleven-track album is his complete vision, a cornucopia of elements announced right away in the Prologue, with Yoruba ritual chants and playful vibraphone and marimba bouncing off of Afro-Cuban percussion. Sosa deftly threads any loose ends together through modern jazz idioms that bridge the ancestral with the contemporary. “Lyade” opens translucent, hymn-like, with Sosa’s sparse, elegant piano filling in the spaces where needed, before a crescendo swells and fluidly shifts from the motherland to one of her many musical off-springs, in this case Cuba. Anchored in the rhythmic tempo of the timbales, a mellifluous flute, courtesy of Cuban Leandro Saint-Hill, weaves in and out of the percussive drive. While bamboo woodwinds inspire breezy ruminations on “Light in the Sky” the mood on “Tres Negros” is optimistic and reminiscent of the cosmopolitan bustle of Old World streets. Sosa’s phrasings are set against the backdrop of pitter-pattering batá drums and Julio Barreto’s trap set, while interspersed, spirited stabs of brass add a sense of urgency. Afreecanos is dedicated to the late Cuban percussion masters, Miguel Angá Diaz and Pancho Quinto. Diaz, who had frequently toured with Sosa, died suddenly of heart failure in 2006 at a relatively young age. On the mournful “Why Angá?” Sosa ends his journey on a melancholic note as Barreto heightens the heart’s agitation with stampeding drum rolls that taper off, lamenting a question that can never be answered.