Acclaimed Cuban pianist Omar Sosa is back in the Bay Area for a week full of gigs
Cuban pianist Omar Sosa arrived in the Bay Area in 1995 by way of Ecuador with a few dollars in his pocket and no musical contacts. Unknown in the US, he was an outsider even at home in Havana, where his path to the piano ran through his training as a percussionist.
Next week, Sosa returns to the Bay Area for a run as artistic director-in-residence at the SFJAZZ Center March 5-8, a sweet triumph for the ever-changing bandleader. Featuring a different project each night, the residency opens Thursday with the Stanford Jazz Orchestra supporting Sosa with Brazilian cellist Jacques Morelenbaum’s world premiere from “Es:sensual,” the pianist’s acclaimed 2018 album with Germany’s NDR Bigband.
Although he has lived in Europe since 1999, the seven-time Grammy Award nominee put down deep roots during his five-year tenure here, spending most of his time in Oakland. Now living in southern Italy, Sosa has played dozens of gigs in the Bay Area in the quarter-century since he left, but he’s never had the chance to present the bulk of his music.
“This is really special,” Sosa said in a recent interview while taking a break from working at producer Greg Landau’s station in Alameda. “I am so grateful to SFJAZZ for making me their artistic director in residence.”
In an interview that spanned three decades of Sosa’s music and career, he recalled how he quickly found his footing in the Bay Area. A friend of his ex-wife, videographer Jeffrey Braverman, encouraged him, and on Sosa’s first night in San Francisco he took the pianist to Bruno’s Mission District jazzspot, where Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers were playing. Braverman informed them that there was a Cuban pianist at the bar and they invited him to stay.
Sosa was unfamiliar with American standards, and the band tried to back it up by calling on a Caribbean tune, Sonny Rollins’ calypso-tinged “St. Thomas.” He passed and finally, “Someone on the team said, ‘You can play!'” Sosa recalled.
“Some guy at the bar called me and said ‘I have some contacts in the Latin world that I can connect with.’ I said, ‘I just came yesterday, please!'”
Sosa couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he gave him the numbers of Cuban musician Fito Reinoso, Uruguayan percussionist Edgardo Cambon, and Santana’s Mission-born percussionist Karl Perazzo, all frontmen of popular Latin dance bands. He called Reinoso first, and by the end of the week he was playing his first gig at Pier 23.
“Fito increased my desire to be a part of something, to join the community,” said Sosa. “It was a great group, with Jesus Diaz on drums, Rahsaan Fredericks on bass, Anthony Blea on violin sometimes, and Fito singing, Benny Moré from the Bay Area. It all started there. There weren’t that many Cuban musicians.
By the time he traveled to Spain in 1999, Sosa had fully embraced the beauty of assembling, gathering musicians from distant cultures under the umbrella of his matrix of Cuban rhythms. Undermining this approach is the Suba Trio featuring Venezuelan musician Gustavo Ovalles and Senegalese kora master Seckou Keita closing the residency on March 8th.
“He was the first Cuban musician to open the door to other influences, mixing our culture with musicians from India, West Africa and the Middle East, and whatever cultures felt attracted,” said Cuban violinist Yilian Cañizares, who performs with Sosa’s Aguas Trio in Kuumbwa on Monday, March 2 and SFJAZZ on Friday, March 6.
Bringing together a very diverse set of ingredients, his Quarteto Americanos, featuring Cuban bassist Ernesto Mazar Kindelán and two of Sosa’s first East Bay collaborators, saxophonist Sheldon Brown and drummer Josh Jones, perform on March 7.
Long based in Switzerland, Cañizares said he was influenced by Sosa long before he met him. Coming from different generations, they formed a soulful duo before adding Gustavo Ovalles to the mix, seamlessly blending Afro-Cuban melodies, contemporary jazz, “and a classic Afro-futuristic influence,” says Sosa.
The group made its Bay Area debut at Yoshi’s in early March, 2020, and the exciting performance seems to launch Cañizares’ North American career. But through the pandemic it took him five years to return to the Bay Area, joining John Santos as a special guest at the Stanford Jazz Festival last summer. And now he’s ready for a year of playing (including a run of high-profile Bay Area gigs with his band in July).
The name Aguas Trio works on a number of levels, Cañizares explains, from Cuba’s geographical location as an island to its devotion to Oshun, the Yoruba goddess associated with fresh water.
“It is also related to the lack of water that we want to have with this project,” he said. “We’ve never played the same way. Aguas literally goes with the flow. This is what makes this project unique and timeless and fun. Yes we have songs and beats and we know where we’re starting from, but we don’t know exactly where we’re going.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscript@aol.com.
OMAR SOSA
Aguas Trio: 7 pm March 2 Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $58.28-$63; www.kuumbwajazz.org
More places to stay at SFJAZZ: 7:30 pm March 5-7, 7 pm March 8 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $39; www.sfjazz.org
