The story
A piano has strings, but it makes its sound with hammers. In Omar Sosa's hands, you hear the connection: a phrase can sing, then become a rhythmic figure that sets the next passage in motion.
His trio with saxophonist Yosvany Terry and drummer Julian Miltenberger makes that percussive instinct central to the music. Called Outside the Box, the project leaves out the bassist. Rhythm becomes a shared responsibility, with piano, saxophone and drums each helping to shape the music's direction.
“Omar Sosa has a way of turning concerts into ceremonies.”
Sosa's music grows out of Afro-Cuban percussion, dance and spiritual traditions. His years of collaboration with musicians across Africa, the Americas and Europe have given him an expansive musical vocabulary, expressed here through piano, keyboards and electronics.
Terry, a longtime collaborator and fellow Cuban musician, plays saxophones and chekere, a beaded gourd percussion instrument. Miltenberger brings another generation into the exchange on drums. The possibilities keep changing as Terry moves between wind and percussion, Sosa adds electronic textures, and the drums contribute melodic ideas of their own.
Reviewing this lineup in Cleveland, Kevin McLaughlin described themes moving among the players, a spare piano motif accompanied by sampled voices, and a playful tribute to Thelonious Monk. Those details suggest the pleasure of this particular trio: hearing musicians respond to an idea while it is still taking shape.