Omar Sosa (b. April 10, 1965) was raised in Camagüey, Cuba’s largest inland city. His father, Sindulfo Sosa, taught history and philosophy, and was a school administrator. His mother, Maricusa Palacios, now retired and living in Havana, was a Telex operator for the electric utility. Sosa grew up listening to classical music and a range of popular artists including Nat King Cole, Count Basie, Orquesta Aragón, Benny Moré, Cachao, Frank Emilio Flynn, and Conjunto Folklórico Nacional. At age eight, Omar began studying percussion and marimba at the Camagüey conservatory; in Havana, as a teenager, he took up piano at the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Música, and rounded out his formal education at the Instituto Superior de Arte. Among his influences, Omar cites traditional Afro-Cuban music, European classical composers (including Chopin, Bartok, and Satie), Monk, Coltrane, Parker, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Chucho Valdés, and the pioneering Cuban jazz group Irakere.
Moving in 1993 to Ecuador, Omar immersed himself in the folkloric traditions of Esmeraldas, the northwest coast region whose African heritage includes the distinctive regional marimba tradition. He relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995, and soon invigorated the Latin jazz scene with his adventurous writing and percussive style. Subsequently, he has collaborated with artists from across Western Europe and all corners of the African continent.
Annually performing upwards of 100 shows on six continents, Omar has appeared in venues as diverse as the Blue Note (New York, Milan, and Tokyo), Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Getty Center, London’s Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall, Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, and Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt; festivals including Monterey Jazz, JVC Jazz, Montreal Jazz, North Sea Jazz, Helsinki, Grenoble Jazz, Montreux Jazz, Naples Jazz, Ravenna Jazz, Roma Jazz, Spoletto, WOMAD, and Cape Town International Jazz; and universities on several continents.
Omar Sosa articulates a brilliant, thoroughly contemporary global jazz idiom that assumes ever-shifting form via a joyous, open-hearted, collaborative approach to musical creativity. Whether as a soloist, ensemble player, or bandleader, Omar creates a music that is simultaneously his own and the world’s—reflecting an immersion in the batá drumming of Santería, the lyricism of the Cuban danzón, the Arabic lute or oud, North African percussion, European classical music, and world jazz. Sosa’s attentive and imaginative melding of sounds from around the world marks him as a courageous and original global artist for the twenty-first century.