Raul Da Gama (Latin Jazz Community) critiques filmmaker Soren Sorensen’s documentary movie in regards to the trajectory of Cuban composer and pianist Omar Sosa, Omar Sosa’s 88 Nicely-Tuned Drums (2022). [See trailer below, and read full review at Latin Jazz Network.]
Anybody approaching this movie in regards to the iconic Cuban composer and pianist Omar Sosa, by the award-winning filmmaker Soren Sorensen can be nearly instantly struck by its [the film’s] Joycean [Ulysses-like] ‘stream-of-consciousness’ narrative model. Whereas this may occasionally not have been the intention of Mr Sorensen at first of his epic odyssey it turns into a novel and fairly gorgeous system for telling the story of probably the most distinctive Cuban artists of an period – modern or in any other case.
The title of the movie – Omar Sosa’s 88 Nicely-Tuned Drums – is an indirect reference to JS Bach’s epic books I and II of The Nicely-Tempered Clavier, is well-intentioned but additionally emerges as ironic and barely irreverent when it offers with the poetics of Mr Sosa’s music. It’s each daunting [and hardly fair] to even try a classification of Mr Sosa’s musical poetics although the preliminary montage of interviews by a number of critics and producers use a number of epithet to explain the expertise of listening to Mr Sosa.
Mr Sorensen subsequently lets the music communicate to the reference to what, actually, unfolds as Mr Sosa’s percussive method to the piano; the 88 keys – at well-tempered intervals – are manipulated by contact, articulation and dynamics right into a symphony of melodic, harmonic, and percussive music that appears to emerge from deep contained in the very coronary heart of the pianist. The music is seemingly been composed by the stressed nerve-endings of the pianist’s very finger-tips slightly than the top of a pencil to be exact. And that is precisely what defines the position of Mr Sosa’s complete nervous-system in the entire musical equation: delicately managed impulses naturally designed to interpret the language of the pianist’s coronary heart and soul on which his distinctive humanity is written.
Mr Sorensen has divined the proper approach for telling the story of Mr Sosa and his music. This can be a breathtaking, non-linear narrative, however a splendidly unfolding, deeply engrossing story stuffed with agony, ecstasy, [musical] neighborhood and utter loneliness, all of which drives the artist – any artist, actually – however which is a way of life that’s so distinctive to Mr Sosa, that it turns into a life-story – from Cuba via [the liberation of] Angola to Europe and america, which is each horrible, in addition to exhilarating; so stuffed with doubt and ache and by some means stuffed with triumphant, cathartic pathos as properly.
This narrative weaves backwards and forwards in time and place as Mr Sosa tells his story, accompanied by a musical commentary on the piano, usually with different musicians. We dwell via the questing urges of the pianist, his sojourn from his beginning in Camagüey, Cuba’s third-largest metropolis, conservatory schooling in Havana, and relocation to Ecuador the place he briefly wrote and organized business jingles. Sosa’s story continues with a fateful mid-90s transfer to the U.S., a stint as a sought-after sideman within the Bay Space’s Latin jazz scene, and partnership with supervisor Scott Worth that continues to today.
Alongside the best way we meet the globetrotting artist in numerous emotive and evocative settings – his duo with celebrated Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu is completely unforgettable the place throughout a dwell efficiency the trumpeter ends the set by holding only one be aware whereas Mr Sosa propels the music with rhythmic cascades… till the trumpeter stands up, walks across the huge live performance grand and the rhythmically-yammering pianist as his be aware fades into the gap. We additionally meet with Mr Sosa’s Afri-Lectric Expertise, and along with his newest band, the Quarteto AfroCubano in storied venues together with New York’s Blue Observe Jazz Membership. Sosa’s Quarteto AfroCubano options fellow Camagüey natives Ernesto Simpson on drums and Leandro Saint-Hill on alto saxophone and flute and bassist Childo Tomas, who hails from Maputo, Mozambique. Maybe most thrilling for [Omar Sosa] followers would be the full-circle nature of Sosa’s 2015 album Ilé, which reunited Sosa’s music with its Cuban roots.
Probably the most thrilling performances, by far, are Mr Sosa’s dwell performances with the Senegalese kora grasp, Sekou Keita, the Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles – a grasp maraquero – and the bewitchingly virtuosic and ethereally lovely and Cuban-Swiss violinist, vocalist and dancer Yilian Cañizares, whose efficiency precedes the magical movie’s dénouement. By this time we’ve found an artist whose quiet humanity is definitely larger-than-life, whose puckish smile punctuates the uncooked silk of his talking voice as he connects a few of the dots within the woven narrative of a life in music; and who appears only a handshake away, but retains his distinctive mystique. A son of the Orisha Eleguá or maybe – one may start to surprise – even the very personification of the Orisha himself – musically-speaking, in fact…
See trailer right here:
For full evaluate, see https://latinjazznet.com/featured/omar-sosa-88-well-tuned-drums-a-film-by-soren-sorensen/
Additionally see https://latinjazznet.com/information/new-documentary-omar-sosa-88-well-tuned-drums/
See extra on the director at https://sorensorensen.internet/