The marriage of jazz and Cuban music

- New World cousins related by African ancestry -                                                                    has given birth to some of the most intoxicating                                                                             music of the past 50 years.  InNew York in the late '                                                                    40's, Dizzy Gillespie and the fabled Cuban conguero Chano Pozo

created a bracing new music merging Cuban polyrhythms with modern jazz harmony and improvisation.  In Havana, a decade later, the legendary bassist-composer Israel "Cacao" Lopez fused mambo and jazz in late-night jam sessions that fueled Latin jazz and salsa.  Today, young Cuban players are making remarkable music drawing on an even wider range of sounds - from secular and sacred Afro-Cuban forms to bebop, pop tunes, and free jazz.

The original and free-flowing Omar Sosa comes to us from this exciting vein.  His impressionistic music encumpasses cha-cha groves and Monkish phrases, yoruba changes, hip-hop beats, and rhapsodic melodies.  the award-winning Cuban composer and pianist ring the economy of a Thelonious Monk and the melodic richness of a Keith Jarrett to the rhythmic power of Afro-Cuban music.  You might say modern, urban music with a Latin jazz heart..