Cuban pianist Omar Sosa arrived in the Bay Area in 1995 by way of Ecuador with a few dollars in his pocket and not a single musical contact. Unknown in the U.S., he was an outlier even back 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 his debut run as a resident artistic director at the SFJAZZ Center March 5-8, a sweet triumph for the ever-evolving bandleader. Featuring a different project each night, the residency opens Thursday with the Stanford Jazz Orchestra backing Sosa for the world premiere of Brazilian cellist Jaques Morelenbaum’s arrangements from “Es:sensual,” the pianist’s acclaimed 2018 album with Germany’s NDR Bigband.
Though he’s lived in Europe since 1999, the seven-time Grammy Award nominee put down deep roots during his five-year stint here, spent mostly in Oakland. Now living in southern Italy, Sosa’s played dozens of Bay Area gigs over the quarter century since he left, but has never before had the opportunity to present such a wide spectrum of his music.
“This is really special,” Sosa said in a recent conversation while taking a break from working at producer Greg Landau’s studio in Alameda. “I’m so grateful to SFJAZZ for making me a resident artistic director.”
In an interview that covered some three decades of Sosa’s music and career, he recalled how quickly he found his footing in the Bay Area. A friend of his ex-wife, videographer Jeffrey Braverman, was putting him up, and on Sosa’s first night in San Francisco he took the pianist to the Mission District jazzspot Bruno’s, where Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers were playing. Braverman let them know there was a Cuban pianist at the bar and they invited him to sit in.
Sosa wasn’t well-versed in American standards, and the band tried to accommodate by calling a tune from the Caribbean neighborhood, Sonny Rollins’ calypso-inflected “St. Thomas.” He made his way through and at the end, “Somebody in the band says, ‘You can play!’” Sosa recalled.
“A guy at the bar called me over and said ‘I have some connections in the Latin universe that I can put you in contact with.’ I said, ‘I just arrived yesterday, please!’”
Sosa can’t recall the man’s name, but he gave him the numbers of Cuban vocalist Fito Reinoso, Uruguayan percussionist Edgardo Cambon, and Mission-born Santana percussionist Karl Perazzo, who were all leading 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 fueled my desire to be part of something, to integrate myself into the community,” Sosa said. “It was a great band, with Jesus Diaz on percussion, Rahsaan Fredericks on bass, Anthony Blea on violin sometimes, and Fito singing, the Benny Moré of the Bay Area. Everything started there. There weren’t that that many Cuban musicians then. Word spread around.”
By the time he left for Spain in 1999, Sosa had fully embraced an aesthetic of accumulation, gathering artists from far-flung traditions under the umbrella of his Cuban rhythmic matrix. Distilling this approach to its essence his Suba Trio featuring Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles and Senegalese kora master Seckou Keita closes the residency March 8.
“He was the first Cuban music who opened the door to other influences, mixing our tradition with Indian, West African and Middle Eastern musicians, whatever traditions he feels drawn to,” said Cuban violinist and vocalist Yilian Cañizares, who performs with Sosa’s Aguas Trio at Kuumbwa Monday, March 2 and SFJAZZ Friday, March 6.
Combining a very different set of ingredients, his Quarteto Americanos, featuring Cuban bassist Ernesto Mazar Kindelán and two of Sosa’s earliest East Bay collaborators, saxophonist Sheldon Brown and drummer Josh Jones, plays March 7.
Long based in Switzerland, Cañizares said she’d been influenced by Sosa long before she met him. Hailing from different generations, they forged a spiritually charged duo before adding Gustavo Ovalles into the mix, which seamlessly combines folkloric Afro-Cuban cadences, contemporary jazz harmonies, “and Afro-futuristic classical influences,” Sosa said.
The group made its Bay Area debut at Yoshi’s in early March, 2020, and the mesmerizing performance seemed to be launching Cañizares’s North American career. But with the pandemic it took five years for her to make it back to the Bay Area, joining John Santos as a special guest at the Stanford Jazz Festival last summer. And now she’s poised for a breakout year (including a run of high-profile Bay Area gigs with her own band in July).
The name Aguas Trio resonates on several level, Cañizares explained, from Cuba’s geographic reality as an island to her devotion to Oshun, the Yoruba goddess associated with fresh water.
“It’s also related to the fluidity we want to have with this project,” she said. “We never play the same. Aguas is literally going with the flow. This is what makes this project so unique and timeless and fun. Of course we have some melodies and rhythms and we know where we start, but we never know precisely where we’re heading.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
OMAR SOSA
Aguas Trio: 7 p.m. March 2 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $58.28-$63; www.kuumbwajazz.org
SFJAZZ residency: 7:30 p.m. March 5-7, 7 p.m. March 8 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $39; www.sfjazz.org
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