A frosting of Latin jazz

Latin jazz is not exactly what I choose to listen to. But it sometimes happens that I come across a TV channel that broadcasts that kind of music and become curious. Or, as happened in Stockholm, that I go with a friend to the Stampen club and am completely caught up into the atmosphere of a band who because of the passage of time and the tricks of memory have become nameless for me but who were playing Latin jazz with passionate engagement and contagious ardour. That lively passionate outburst of instruments and voices into unmistakeable rhythms that I heard again, no less stormy and unstoppable, in another club or rather live music bar in Zurich – Cannella.

And these memories have returned on account of the Cuban Omar Sosa.

I found out about Omar Sosa entirely by chance on Mezzo as I was wandering, remote in hand, among the few channels I had left undeleted from the list of hundreds of opportunities to waste time, doped and swamped by the soup of consumerism and violated by the subculture of entertainment programmes in which everyone laughs inanely, shouts, contradicts each other, asks idiotic questions in an insinuating tone of voice and tries to appear intelligent. Luckily, all this offensive carnival of stupidity can be got rid of by simply pressing the delete button lots of times so that what is left is just the personal archipelago where you know you can find the universe that you have decided to live in, the one from which you can nourish your mind and spirit with wholesome food.

I found out about Omar Sosa one after-midnight that was sunk in the soft matter of insomnia blended with reverie, as I was about to take the next day seriously and, by turning off the television, to convince myself that it was really time to end the one that had just closed. And I stayed in that no man’s land of hours with a well-defined purpose, and I stayed there and listened to an entire concert, enjoying the fairyland colours of the band and the auditory strangeness of an African language that I had no way of understanding but which communicated subliminally with my inner being, as if it were an almost betrayed secret. I listened to pieces sung in Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and English, springing from the interwoven sounds of equally exotic instruments that came to blend their cultures in a fascinating melting-pot.

The exoticism of ethno-jazz, this fusion between vocal resonances that are foreign, unaccustomed, unusual and bizarre and the sound of instruments (guembri, oud, djembe, balaphone, marimba, batá, cimbalom, kongoman, m’bira, “speaking drum”) that are equally far from our everyday imagination, from our recognition system (accustomed to immediate identification and categorisation), alternating with doses of ‘pure’ jazz, piano solos, wind reprises and limpid themes and lots and lots of percussion pigmented with virtuoso vocaliza.

I listened to Sentir, a complex and heterogeneous album by Omar Sosa, and as I write this I realise that I am justified in saying that fusion jazz is somehow heterogeneous in itself and Sosa’s Afro-Cuban jazz is the conglomerate of a multicoloured stylistic variety that contains fragments of a multicultural religiosity skilfully blended into an expression of contemporary jazz. Those superb tracks Oda al Negro and Tre notas en amarillo and Manto Blanco, a piece with an interesting structure since it is vocally stratified between an African dialect and an English rap-type speech, with a theatrical dialogue between the female soloist and the pianist, voices which seem to be practising humour blended in the harmonies of modern jazz.

And then as I listened to Afreecanos and the more uniform Mulatos (what a beautiful track El Consenso is...) I remembered Buena vista social club, a legendary band, with that same verve and mixture of pigments but also with a poetic charge found only in Russian party songs sung by gypsy nomads (the film Şatra), with their volcanic, passionate, dramatic, tumultuous romanticism (Veinte años), or in the Romanian romances of the inter-war years, but with a red-hot energy that only the stage can convey and a concert atmosphere. Where the subtle spirit is at work radiating from the audience,

a harmonious fusion of inner energies, when all the inside windows are open and the pure air that carries the music comes in and goes out again enriched, when the mind has abandoned itself to the joy of listening and of leaving the outside world...outside. When the audience becomes a single entity, an impetuous resounding instrument and sings with all its multiple and yet now indivisible being. Chan Chan, a true hymn the group play, which receives thunderous applause every time the chorus From Alto Cedro I go to Marcane/ And then from Cueto, I take the road towards Mayari is heard...