2. Avantgarde Jazz Festival: Omar Sosa
Composer, pianist and band leader Omar Sosa has taken a musical journey reflecting an odyssey from Cuba to Africa and Brazil and his moving from Central America to African-origin communities in Ecuador, from San Francisco and New York to the West Coast and the Mediterranean.
Composer, pianist and band leader Omar Sosa has taken a musical journey reflecting an odyssey from Cuba to Africa and Brazil and his moving from Central America to African-origin communities in Ecuador, from San Francisco and New York to the West Coast and the Mediterranean. Faithful to his afro-Cuban sources, Sosa is an advocate of a spiritual vision of uncompromised artistic generosity including the humanity as a whole. Sosa has won a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian Associates program, has been a five-time Grammy nominee and twice nominated for BBC’s world music awards. Sosa combines cultural traditions of Africa and Europe, North and South Americas. He articulates a brilliant yet modern global jazz idiom that takes on a new form through a joyful, open and cooperative approach to musical creativity. Regardless of whether he plays the part of a soloist, player in an ensemble or band leader, Omar Sosa creates music that is both personal and global, reflecting his deep submersion in the Santeria tradition of the batá drums, the lyricism of Cuban danzón, the sound of the Arab lute, oudo and North African percussions, European classical music and world jazz. Sosa’s careful and imaginative combination of sounds from all over the world makes him a bold and original global artist of the twenty-first century.
