Omar Sosa - Prietos (2001) CD-Rip

The talented Cuban-born, San Francisco Bay-area-based pianist/composer Omar Sosa is an aural alchemist of the first order. On this CD--his seventh as a leader--Sosa creates an intricate and dynamic pan-African musical palette. His Thelonious Monk/Bill Evans piano stylings ingeniously merge with his brilliantly arranged array of African, African American, and Afro-Latin instruments, languages, and music genres. Save for the CD's three evocative ballads, "Twice As Sad," "Fragile," and "Misa," Sosa's compositions are folkloric in their percussive underpinnings and futuristic in their jazzy horn lines and hybrid combinations of Old and New World instrumentations and voicings. The sacred Santeria syncopations of "Desde Allah" and the title track are powered by the powerful bata, djembe, and tambor redondo drums; funky urban numbers, such as "Takes a Second" and "Why So Complicated," swing with a hip North American black urbanity. Sosa combines the far-flung black music of the Afro-Islamic Gnawa's of Morocco with Yoruba/Candomble chants from Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela and hip-hop/rap poetry from America. In Omar Sosa's mercurial music, past and present form a formidable future. -- Eugene Holley Jr.