Prietos
The talented Cuban-born, San Francisco Bay-area-based  pianist/composerOmar Sosais   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  powerfulbata,djembe, andtambor redondodrums;  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.