Omar Sosa’s concerts frequently spawn a kind of jazz calisthenics, with Sosa dancing around his piano, shifting in his seat as he attacks the keys, and waving his arms as he gets into the songs’ freneticism. This high-flying Sosa is nowhere to be found on his latest album, Calma, whose musical spareness begs the question: What caused Sosa to change direction?
Call it a mid-career reassessment, or call it the way Sosa calls it: He’s simply in the mood for more reflective music. It’s not to the exclusion of his up-tempo style. Both dimensions will be evident when Sosa performs with his quintet next Monday, May 16, at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, and Wednesday, May 18, at Yoshi’s in San Francisco.
“I did the record to heal myself. I travel all over the world, and it’s hard when I see how crazy the world is — how we’re treating each other,” Sosa says. “I feel people need peace and calm.”
Sosa has done what jazz musicians have always done: interpret their times for a bigger audience and for their own well-being. John Coltrane did this in 1963 when he recorded the song “Alabama,” in response to a racist church bombing that killed four African-American girls. Sosa, who’s been nominated for five Grammys, is now 46 and the father of two young children. One of the most prolific Cuban artists in jazz, Sosa is always juggling new projects and new concert dates — a pace that heightens his awareness of how hectic and discombobulated the world can be.
Sosa’s Bay Area performances are a homecoming for him — he lived here in the 1990s, his record label, Ota, is based in Oakland, and it’s here that he established himself as a jazz innovator. In Sosa’s songs, you hear a melding of all the music that inspires him: Cuban, classical (including Satie and Debussy), African, Indian, and the jazz of Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and other American stalwarts. Since Sosa is so comfortable in different traditions, the element of surprise is always there with him; even within the same song (as on “L3zero,” from his 2004 album Mulatos), a sequence may feature a sample of a DJ scratch, a Cuban rumba, a fantastical vibraphone, and a Benny Goodman-like clarinet solo — all anchored by piano-playing that glides and cavorts from here to there. Composer John Adams used the Latin phrase for “genius” to describe what Sosa does, saying a few years ago that “Sosa is a deeply creative musician with an extraordinary harmonic sense. His piano playing is sui generis: It has obvious roots in Cuban music, but he’s taken his approach to the keyboard into completely new regions.”